Building Yaleeq
What building a real product taught me - and why we shut it down.
Finding an internship was hard and it sucked, so Youssef Tarek and I started Yaleeq as a place to list internships. It grew into automatically finding them from across the internet, with companies posting directly through their own accounts. We expanded further with profiles for every user, analyzing their CVs to match them with the right opportunity. We hit 700+ users.
We stopped because it felt like a waste of time, honestly. No real internships were being listed. Almost everything was just recommendations, and even the listed ones were mostly for show or data collection.
Still, it was an amazing experience. We learned how to work as a team, organize work, set priorities, and actually move a real product to market: marketing on LinkedIn to 600+ followers, pitching the idea to anyone who’d listen, pitching to investors, and working all night on the product. Life-changing, even though we stopped.