Switching from Traditional Gig Search to Searching for Companies with Problems I Can Solve

I was talking to a recruiter friend last week. She told me something that made my jaw drop: every job posting now gets 800+ applications within hours. Most of them are bots.

The economy is wild right now. Everyone's scrambling. Traditional job hunting is broken.

Do I really want to go through 50 applications and pitches a day? As I think about it, what I'm really looking for are companies with problems I can solve.

The Automation: Finding Problems at Scale

I built a system that monitors company problems 24/7 while everyone else competes with bots.

The Daily Workflow

Every morning at 9am, automatically:

  1. Scrape 7 intelligence sources to monitor the landscape (6 Google Alerts + RSS)

  2. Aggregate signals of companies with problems I can solve

  3. Filter for relevance (remote-first, startup-stage, AI-native) + de-dup

  4. Deliver to Slack - top 20 opportunities

Time spent: 2-3 minutes reviewing vs. 30-60 minutes manual searching

The difference: I'm finding problems, not competing for positions.

Honestly, I don't know why I'm posting about this 'secret sauce'. I just thought this was too cool.

How to Set This Up

Create Google Alerts with problem-focused queries:

Leadership gaps:

("head of design" OR "VP of design") (hiring OR jobs) remote

Strategic needs:

("AI strategy" OR "AI enablement" OR "AI transformation") (hiring OR jobs)

Growth signals:

("product designer" OR "product design") (startup OR "Series A") (hiring OR remote)

Each alert generates an RSS feed monitoring thousands of sites.

Cost: $0
Setup time: 20 minutes
Result: Finding problems before they become saturated job postings

The Build

Once you have Google Alerts feeding you signals, here's how to automate the rest:

Platform: Relay.app (no-code automation)

Architecture:

Problem Signals (7 RSS feeds)
    ↓
Aggregate & Deduplicate  
    ↓
Filter & Sort (newest first)
    ↓
Slack Notification (top 20)

What's Next: Adding AI Intelligence

Phase 1 (current): Find companies with problems
Phase 2 (building): Qualify and research automatically

Coming soon:

  • AI scoring against my and TAILORU's ICP (0-$15M ARR companies)

  • Automatic company research (stage, funding, team size)

  • Contact finding (founders, decision-makers)

  • Personalized outreach draft generation

  • Warm intro identification (mutual connections)

The vision: "Here's a Series A HealthTech company that just raised $8M, needs AI product help, and you have 3 mutual connections with their founder."

The result? I spend 2 minutes reviewing opportunities instead of 30-60 minutes searching. I'm finding 20+ companies with problems I can solve every day—before their postings get overwhelmed with 800 bot applications.

Thu Do is an AI Builder and AI Experience Architect who has helped 20+ teams move from 0 to 1. She’s also runs TAILORU Collective, a network of 40+ AI designers and trainers at the intersection of AI x Humanity. She is, clearly also an over-sharer and looking for her next project. Contact Thu if you are curious to collaborate.