Why we're building Bringboard (and giving it away during beta)

The problem we kept seeing

If you've hired at a growing company, you know the moment. You're managing three open roles in a spreadsheet. Candidate names blur together. Someone on the team asks "where are we with that backend engineer?" and you spend ten minutes digging through email threads and Slack messages to piece together an answer.

So you look for a proper tool.

The enterprise ATS platforms want $5,000+ a year and a two-week onboarding process. They assume you have a recruiting ops team configuring workflows and running reports. You don't. You have a founder, maybe one recruiter, and a handful of hiring managers who check in when they remember.

The free tools are spreadsheets wearing a mask. They'll get you through one or two roles, but the moment you're juggling five positions with different stages, different interviewers, and different timelines, they fall apart. No email integration. No scheduling. No automation. No careers page worth showing a candidate.

Growing teams, the ones doing the most hiring relative to their size, are stuck between these two options. Neither respects how they work.

What we tried (and what frustrated us)

[FOUNDER INPUT NEEDED: This section needs your personal story. Write 2-3 paragraphs about your direct experience with hiring tools. Some prompts to get you started:

• Which tools did you try? What was the first one, and why did you pick it?

• What specific moment made you realize the tool wasn't working? (A lost candidate, a scheduling disaster, a pricing shock, a feature wall?)

• Did you build internal workarounds? Notion boards, Google Sheets with conditional formatting, Slack channels for hiring updates?

• What was the cost, in time and missed candidates, of those workarounds?

Be specific. Name the tools if you're comfortable. Describe the exact friction. Readers trust founders who've felt the same pain they're feeling right now.]

The pattern was the same every time: start with excitement, hit a wall within weeks, and either pay through the nose to get past it or go back to the spreadsheet. Neither outcome felt acceptable.

[FOUNDER INPUT NEEDED: Add a sentence or two about the moment you decided to build Bringboard. What was the final straw? What made you say "I'll build this myself" instead of switching tools again?]

What we're building differently

Bringboard isn't a stripped-down enterprise tool. It isn't a spreadsheet with better fonts. It's an applicant tracking system designed from scratch for teams hiring 5-50 people a year, where every person involved in hiring has other work to do too.

Here's what that means in practice:

Your process, not ours. Custom stages, custom fields, custom application forms. You define the pipeline that matches how your team hires, per position if needed. No rigid templates. No "upgrade to unlock custom workflows."

Communication built in, not bolted on. Full threaded email with custom sending domains, templates, and merge fields. Candidates get emails from hiring@yourcompany.com, not noreply@some-tool.io. Every message lives on the candidate's timeline, visible to your whole team.

Scheduling candidates love. Google Calendar integration with candidate-facing booking pages. Candidates pick a time that works. No more four-email chains to find a slot. No separate Calendly subscription.

A careers page that represents your brand. Branded portals on your own custom domain with configurable application forms and SEO settings. Your open roles look like they belong to your company, not to your ATS vendor.

Automation for the work that shouldn't be manual. Stage-move triggers, automatic emails, property changes. Set them at the org level or per position. The repetitive tasks get handled so you can spend time on the parts of hiring that need a human.

Candidate enrichment. LinkedIn and GitHub data pulled into profiles automatically. You get context on candidates before the first conversation, without toggling between browser tabs.

Why it's free right now

Bringboard is in open beta. The full product, every feature, no credit card, no gates.

Here's the honest reason: we need teams using it. Real teams, with real candidates, running real hiring processes. That's the only way to find out what's missing, what's confusing, and what needs to change before we charge for it.

Free during beta isn't a marketing tactic. It's a deal. You get a full-featured ATS at no cost. We get feedback that makes Bringboard better for everyone who comes after you.

No bait-and-switch. When we introduce pricing, beta users will know well in advance, and early adopters will get the best terms we offer. That's a commitment.

[FOUNDER INPUT NEEDED: If you want to add a personal note here about your philosophy on pricing, transparency, or how you think about the beta relationship with early users, this is the spot. One to two sentences from you would strengthen this section.]

What's coming

We ship features every week. Here's what's on the roadmap right now:

• Scorecards and structured feedback. Interviewers fill out standardized evaluations tied to each stage. No more "yeah they seemed good" in Slack.

• Bulk actions and advanced filtering. Manage large candidate pools without clicking through profiles one by one.

• Deeper integrations. Slack notifications, additional calendar providers, and job board posting are all on the list.

We publish updates as we ship them. No vaporware, no "coming soon" pages that sit for months. If you want to see the pace, check the changelog.

[FOUNDER INPUT NEEDED: Optional. If there's a longer-term vision you want to share, even one sentence about where you see Bringboard in a year, add it here. Keep it grounded. Something like "We want Bringboard to be the default answer when a 30-person company asks 'what should we use to hire?'" works better than grand proclamations.]

Built for growing teams

If your team has outgrown spreadsheets but doesn't need (or can't afford) an enterprise ATS, Bringboard exists for you.

Sign up for the beta. It takes two minutes. You get the full product from day one.

Then tell us what's broken. What's missing. What would make you recommend it to another founder or recruiter.

We're building the hiring tool you've been looking for. Your feedback decides what it becomes.

If you're switching from another tool, our migration guide covers how to bring your data with you.

Want to see what a strong hiring process looks like for a growing team? Start with how to build a hiring process that doesn't lose candidates, or learn why your careers page matters more than you think.