I’m an MIS senior at UW Bothell. I applied to about 400 internships last cycle. Roughly 6 callbacks. The ones that became offers were the ones I actually tailored — the resume named the team, the cover letter named a project, the recruiter outreach didn’t sound like a sales blast. Everything else was noise.
I built AutoAppli because the tools that exist either spam-fire applications — which tanks your callback rate, the math is in the blog — or they just track what you’ve already done. Neither helps the part that actually moves the rate. I wanted the boring 10 minutes of prep — resume tailoring, cover letter, recruiter outreach — automated, and the actual application left to me.
The reason it’s for students specifically is that internship recruiting is calendar-driven and that calendar is brutal. Big tech opens reqs in August. Mid-size companies in October. Bootcamp-friendly shops and quant in January. New-grad runs from September through March. Miss a window and you’re reapplying next year. AutoAppli’s defaults — the cycle reminders, the ranked job firehose, the kanban column structure — are tuned for that calendar. A general-audience tool can’t do that without contorting itself.
The kanban specifically exists because of one night, spring of sophomore year, when I had 23 tabs open trying to remember which Stripe role I’d already applied to. I had a Notion table, a Google Sheet, a Discord DM with a friend, and somehow they all disagreed. I closed the tabs, slept, and the next morning sketched what eventually became the dashboard. Bookmarked, applied, interviewing, offer. Each card carries the JD, the resume version, the cover letter, and the apply timestamp. That’s it. No fancier than that, on purpose.
The product has a posture, and the posture is: I will not click apply for you. The Chrome extension is read-only. The backend has zero browser-automation libraries. AutoAppli sets up the prep and you submit on the company’s own page. That posture loses some potential users — the ones who want a robot — and it’s deliberate, because every recruiter I’ve talked to has the same line about spotting auto-submitted applications instantly.