About Jobs
Launch a product into a town of two hundred virtual residents and watch what they make of it.
What it is
Jobs is for independent developers and small teams whose product is freshly built and has no real users yet. Before sending it out, they want to see what happens when a crowd of very different people meets it for the first time.
You give it a URL, a name and one line. The residents of JobsWorld live by their own schedules, come across your product in the app store, in ads and from people they know, and decide for themselves whether to look, to use it, to stay and whom to tell. Come back a little later and read a one-page conclusion in plain language.
How it works
- Encounter: with a phone at hand, residents scroll past ads, browse the store and see what others post; they glimpse a billboard on the way; someone they know brings it up. Most exposures are never noticed.
- Decision: only someone who noticed it gets to say whether they open it. Busy, tired or simply not their thing, and they scroll on. Nobody is assigned to test.
- Use: whoever opens it uses it in the situation they are in at that moment, sees only screenshots, and does not know it is a test. When sign-up is needed they use the email address and phone number the town issued them.
- Afterwards: whether they write a review, whom they tell and whether they come back in a few days all follow from that experience; word of mouth travels along their relationships.
- Conclusion: whether it works, what hurt most, who stays and who leaves, why people who saw it did not open it, and the one thing to fix first. Every sentence opens to who said it, their words and the screen at that moment.
What it is not
- It is not a forecast of a real market. Every head count is what happened in this town: a simulation that has not been calibrated against real people.
- It does not replace research with real users. Feedback from synthetic users runs shallow, runs positive and misses the long tail.
- It is not a hosted service. It runs on your own machine, with models you connect, and the data stays with you.
- The residents are not real people. Their names, life stories and opinions are written by a model; any resemblance to an actual person is coincidental.
Where the residents come from
The Chinese population is generated from a hand-set conditional sampling table (household type, age, education, occupation, income) whose values approximate the scale of published aggregate statistics. The English-speaking population is sampled at random from NVIDIA Nemotron-Personas-USA (CC BY 4.0, a synthetic population based on US census distributions) and then assembled into households. Values such as digital literacy, eyesight and patience are derived by rules; the model writes only names, life stories and opinions.
Who is behind it
Jobs is built and run by PlutoKeating as an individual, not a company. This website only presents the project and serves the install script. Bugs and suggestions go to GitHub Issues; for anything else, write to PlutoKeating@outlook.com.
Open source and thanks
Jobs is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0, with the source on GitHub. It stands on these projects, each used under its own licence:
- Browser and interface understanding: Playwright, Midscene, axe-core, rrweb.
- Services and storage: Fastify, PostgreSQL with pgvector, MinIO, NATS, Drizzle.
- Web: React, TanStack Router and Query, Tailwind CSS, PixiJS, Lucide.
- Game side: TShock and tModLoader; the schematic reader is ported from TEdit (Microsoft Public License). Terraria is a trademark of Re-Logic, and Jobs is not affiliated with Re-Logic.
- Data: the models.dev model catalog; NVIDIA Nemotron-Personas-USA (CC BY 4.0).
- Type: Inter and Noto Sans CJK SC, both under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.