Why I'm building Sillons

I built Sillons for myself. Not as a side project, not as a startup. Just as the tool I wished existed when I started thinking seriously about my own career. I was tired of every job board treating me like a single keyword, tired of trackers that asked me to flatten a real life into a single funnel, tired of the quiet violence of having to pick one furrow and stay in it.

So I built the thing I wanted. Quietly, on evenings and weekends. Nobody was watching. Nobody had asked for it. There was no pitch deck, no roadmap, no growth plan. Just one user, me, fixing what irritated me about my own job search and refusing to ship anything I wouldn't keep open in a tab the next morning.

Then I showed it to a few friends. Smart people, mid-career, the kind who quietly run three furrows in parallel. The day job, the next move, the maybe-someday. And never tell anyone because there's no software that lets them. Every single one said the same thing, in slightly different words: I need this for my own search. Can I have it?

That was the moment. Not a market study, not a survey, not a TAM slide. Just three or four people I trust, reacting to a thing on my screen the way I had reacted to it months earlier. It went from “my tool” to “our tool” in the space of a few coffees.

So here we are. Sillons, in public, in beta. The French word means furrow. The line a plough cuts in a field. Farmers don't plant one furrow. They plant many, in parallel, and they tend them all season. Some yield, some don't. The point is that the field is the unit, not the line. Your career is the field. Each version of yourself you're considering is a furrow.

Sillons is a cockpit, not a job board. Somewhere quiet, where the multi-track reality of a modern career is treated as the default instead of an edge case. Where the work of thinking about your career. The assumptions, the trade-offs, the half-written cover letters, the companies you almost applied to. Is preserved instead of lost between tabs.

I publish it with the same constraints I applied while it was just mine. No hype. No dark patterns. No selling your data to recruiters. No usage meters, no engagement loops engineered to keep you scrolling. Sillons never becomes an advertising surface. That is the one rule.

The aesthetic is on purpose too. Premium-restrained, not flashy. The typography breathes. The colours come from soil and paper, not from a startup template. The cockpit feels closer to a quiet office than to a dashboard, because thinking about your career is closer to writing than to gaming, and the software should know that.

That's it. That's the whole story. One person built something he needed, a few friends needed it too, and now it's open to anyone whose career also refuses to fit on a single line. If something here resonates, write to me. hello@sillons.app. I read everything.

Wael