How to Actually Stand Out When Applying

Hey, we get a lot of messages like

Hustling is a good signal but it doesn’t guarantee you stand out. This post exists to give you insights.

What Goes Wrong

❌ Listing achievements with no context
✅ Show how your experience connects to a real need we have
🤔 But to do that you need to understand our need. Do you really understand it or are you assuming? What is the probability that your assumption is right? How do you verify your assumption?

❌ Pitching generic skills
✅ Dig into the product/company and figure out what’s actually useful
🤔 Anyone can say they’re “organized” or “collaborative.” What’s useful is knowing what we actually need and tailoring to that. How do you determine what we actually need?

❌ Sending a list of ideas
✅ Figure out what real problem to solve (not just guess from the outside)
🤔 Find signals of what matters most to the company and aim at that

❌ Explaining why you’re a good fit
✅ Demonstrate how you’d help — with specifics
🤔 Anyone can say I can do X. Few say, I did X. Show, don’t tell

❌ Requesting a call
✅ Respect time and add value upfront
🤔 Everyone is requesting a call, if we said yes to all, we wouldn’t have time to sleep

What does stand out?

  1. People who do research, identify real pain points, and show initiative to address them
  2. People who think before they speak, and focus on us, not them
  3. People who are problem oriented instead of solution oriented
  4. People who can write pages worth of value in a single sentence

You don’t stand out by trying to get noticed. You stand out by understanding what matters.

I hope this helps.

Examples

Jack Dorsey