We've sat in your seat.

Hired as cyber security manager at a fintech to build a brand new SOC team from scratch. Hundreds of applications per role within the first week.

HR ran the first CV screen and kept escalating because they could not tell the good from the bad. Took the CV filtering on myself. Hours and hours spent reviewing all the applications.

Then the interviews. The CCNA holder who could not tell me the difference between TCP and UDP. The CISSP who could not reason through a basic alert. So many people, only good on paper.

There had to be a better way.

Built a Google Sheet (link here for nostalgia) to track candidates against the criteria that actually mattered. Helpful. But still theoretical. Needed a way to measure real hands-on skill.

Started writing my own scenarios. Asked candidates to work through them remotely. The signal was completely different. I knew within an hour who could actually do the job.

This must already exist as a product. Checked. Booked demos with the players in the space. All built for training, university CTFs, certification practice. None of them built for hiring decisions.

Quit the job. Moved back in with the parents. Invested the savings into building the platform I wished existed.

Three years. Thousands of dev hours. Hundreds of design hours. Burned out, stressed, broke, building anyway. Took contract work through 2024/5 to keep paying the bills. The build paused for months. Then started again. Then stopped. Then started again.

First commercial version shipped. Private beta. Real cyber teams using it on real candidates. The platform I wished existed when I was hiring in 2022 is the one you can request an access code for today.