# Trailblaze

A job app that helped students and young adults land their first jobs. I co-founded it and led the engineering, and it grew past 10,000 users in under a year.

- Role: Co-Founder & CTO
- Dates: January 2021 – April 2024
- Page: https://jlawrence.io/work/trailblaze

## Why we started it

My co-founder and I had looked for part-time work ourselves, and the job sites we tried weren't built for someone looking for a first job. In January 2021 we started building an app for students and young adults in that spot. It was called Grindstone at first, and we rebranded to Trailblaze later.

## What I built

I was the CTO. I built the app's screens in React Native, along with the services behind it and the database, and I worked the designs out in Figma first. The company's public website was mine too, designed and built in Next.js.

The Discover screen let you search for a job or browse by category, such as part-time, retail or restaurant work, and showed the newest jobs with their city and pay.

## How it went

We started with part-time, entry-level work. Over time we moved into the jobs that start a career, such as internships. The app grew to over 10,000 users in less than a year after launch.

I stepped away in April 2024 to finish my degree, and went on to work as a software engineer.

## What I took from it

At Trailblaze I was building for real users, thousands of them. At a startup that small I also did a lot that wasn't development, such as marketing and outreach.