By Fran Méndez, creator of AsyncAPI
Un-
rejectable.
A four-week mentorship group for engineers who do great work and stay invisible. Fix that, and the right people come to you.
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.
When things are fine, it feels like showing off
So you only speak up when you need something. The job's gone, the launch is flopping, the runway's short. That's the one time it reads as desperate, and works worst.
The work does not speak for itself. It never has, for anyone, in any field, at any point in history. I believed that for decades and have a graveyard of archived repos to prove it. The people you compare yourself to are not better than you. Most of them have less behind them than you do. They just told someone.
And telling someone isn't ego. Staying quiet isn't humility. It's just the truth, said out loud.
What it is
Four weeks.
Eight of you. Me.
Two hours a week
One call, the whole group, every week. You bring your actual work, the stuff you do and never talk about. 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. Seven people expecting you next week is the entire mechanism.
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 real behind it. The hollow accounts you can't stand have the doors and nothing behind them. You have the opposite problem, and it's the easy one to fix.
All of it on your own work. The side thing you built and never mentioned, the hard problem you quietly solve at your job, the stuff you're figuring out right now. You don't need a secret project. 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.
The job you want comes asking, and you aren't there to be tested. The thing you built gets used, because the right people already heard about it. And when you need something, whether a role, a customer, an intro or a co-founder, you ask people who know your name instead of strangers who don't.
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 have your own version of that 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 you and the things you build. Good work does not get noticed on its own. Reputation is what gets it seen, and reputation can be built.
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. That's when this works.
You think the game is rigged
You think 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.
You have no room to think right now
This is a mindset change before it's anything else, and that takes real headspace, especially early. If you're underwater right now, this is the wrong moment. Come back when you have the space. It'll keep.
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
Claim your spot.
Eight seats. €500 for this founding group, and it becomes €1,000 after. It runs once the eight are filled, and you can take a full refund any time before it starts.
Claim your spot · €500→