Un-
rejectable.
Be the one who chooses.
Your work is better than your options.
That gap has a cause and it isn't the work. Four weeks, eight of you, and me, on the only part that's actually hard: telling anyone what you've built.
What you tell yourself
“The work speaks for itself.”
Before you build, it feels like lying
Talking about something that doesn't exist yet feels like claiming credit you haven't earned. So you wait until it's real. It never gets real enough.
After you ship, it feels like begging
You posted it once. Three likes, two from friends. Saying it a second time would look like you needed something, so you never did.
While employed, it feels ungrateful
You're fine right now, so bringing up the nine months you spent job hunting sounds paranoid. You only post when you're unemployed. You've noticed.
It doesn't. It never has. Not for anyone, in any field, at any point in history. I believed it for ten years and I have a graveyard of archived repos to prove it. The people you're comparing yourself to are not better than you. Most of them have less behind them than you do. They just told someone.
What it is
Four weeks.
Eight of you. Me.
Two hours a week
One call, the whole group, every week. You bring what you're sitting on and what you didn't post. Nobody watches a video.
Monthly, same group
Four weeks proves nothing. The person who changed my career showed up years in, so we keep meeting for a while. I drop in. You keep going with each other.
Eight people
Small enough that you can't quietly stop and hope nobody noticed. That's not a limitation. That's the entire mechanism.
It isn't a course and it won't become one. Everything a course could teach you is already written down, and it's free: everything I know about being found. You are not stuck because you don't know what a blog is.
You're stuck because doing it feels like begging, and that doesn't get fixed by watching a video of me. It gets fixed in a room where six other people are doing it too and nobody dies.
What you'd actually do
Say it early,
say it often.
Early
Before it's built. Before it works. Before it's good. Kills the excuse that it isn't ready yet, which is an excuse that never expires on its own.
Often
Forever, not one announcement. Long past the point where you are certain everyone is sick of hearing you. Kills the excuse that you already said that.
Elsewhere
Where the problem already lives, not only on channels you own. Someone else did the work of gathering the people. You show up.
Open
A way in, and someone behind it. This is the only line between you and the people you can't stand on this website.
All of it on your own work. The thing you built years ago and never mentioned to anyone, or the one that's still just an idea in your head. Not exercises, not a case study, not my projects. Yours, in public, starting in week one.
What it gets you
People have
heard of you.
That's the whole thing. Everything else falls out of it.
When you talk to a company, they already know what you can do, so you aren't there to be tested. You're there to work out whether their problem is interesting enough to be worth your time. When a layoff round comes, and one will, you're not starting from a blank PDF and nine months of savings. When you want something, you ask people who already know your name.
I haven't applied for a job since 2017. Not because I'm special. Because enough people had heard of me that I never had to.
There is no reason you can't say the same sentence in a few years. None of it was talent. I was worse at this than you are, and I only started because a room of fifteen people let me.
Who's running this
Fran Méndez
Creator of AsyncAPI | Author of Shift | Building Commune
Fran created AsyncAPI, the open standard for defining asynchronous APIs — now adopted by thousands of companies worldwide including GitHub, Citibank, NASA, Adidas, and Lego, and hosted under the Linux Foundation.
He wrote Shift on a conviction he earned the hard way: having the best technology doesn't matter if you can't get people on board. Unrejectable applies that same lesson to your career. Raw skill won't open doors. Reputation does.
Shift
How to drive architectural change when great tech isn't enough
Video coming soon
Fran introduces what Unrejectable is, why he built it, and what you'll get out of it.
Fran Méndez
Creator of AsyncAPI
Fran created AsyncAPI, the open standard for defining asynchronous APIs — now adopted by thousands of companies worldwide including GitHub, NASA, Adidas, Lego, and Citibank, and hosted under the Linux Foundation.
He wrote Shift on a conviction he earned the hard way: having the best technology doesn't matter if you can't get people on board. Unrejectable applies that same lesson to your career. Raw skill won't open doors. Reputation does.
Shift
How to drive architectural change when great tech isn't enough
Don't buy this
If any of this is you.
You want the reputation more than the work
All of this amplifies whatever is actually there. If that's nothing, it makes you loud and hollow, and everyone can tell immediately. This is for people who build things and never mention them. The building is the part you bring.
You need a job in six weeks
Then this is the wrong thing and I won't pretend otherwise. Reputation compounds over years, and you don't have years. Do the applications, take the job, and come back when you're employed and still quietly scared. That's when this works.
You think the game is rigged
That individuals don't stand a chance, that it's all luck and money and reach. I can't argue you out of that and I'm not going to try. I believed it for a decade about a project sitting on my own hard drive.
I'd rather lose the sale than take money from someone this can't help. If you're still here after reading that, you're exactly who I'm building it for.
The first cohort
Tell me you want in.
It runs the moment there are enough of you, and enough is about eight people. So you're not a rounding error on this list. You're roughly an eighth of whether it happens at all.