I wanted a personal website. Nothing fancy, just a simple showcase of my actual projects, my skills and how to hire or work with me.
The people I want to find are not just writing code or just designing screens. They are using AI to move across the whole stack of making things. That's me: I design, write code, ship products, make videos, and prototype things that don't have a name yet. How do I make sure people know about all my projects? Because you can bet your ass I'm not frequently updating LinkedIn, my GitHub profile would be the next best option but normies have no clue what to do with that.
So I sat down to build my portfolio site. About an hour in, while Claude and I were working very hard trying to get hydration working to enable server-side rendering, I figured there should be a better way to make a personal website. Then it hit me... I own discover.me, and the thing I was actually doing, screaming at Claude, could in fact be the product, but with less screaming.
So, the next LinkedIn?
Plenty of people have tried to build a better LinkedIn. Most are dead. Polywork raised $44.5M from a16z and the Stripe founders, never made a dollar, and the founder handed the cash back and shut it down last year. read.cv was the one designers actually loved, and it got acqui-hired into Perplexity and wound down the same month.
They died the same way. Both started as a clean profile, drifted into a social feed, and then needed you to show up and post every day to keep the thing alive. When people stopped posting, there was nothing left to find. And both only ever charged the person being listed, never the person doing the hiring.
The profile idea was never the problem. Polywork's founder said it on the way out: the world still needs a new standard for professional identity. What was missing was a way to keep a profile true without making it a second job, and that didn't exist in 2021. Now it does. I don't update a profile anymore, I talk to my agent. It already has my repos, my files, the thing I shipped last week, so it asks better questions than a form ever could, and it keeps the page current without me feeding a feed.
What "agent-built" means
The profile is first-party. I authored it, through my agent, with my consent. It isn't scraped from somewhere I forgot I posted, and the connection doesn't close after onboarding. The same MCP server that builds it keeps editing it: change a status, add a project, browse the directory, without leaving the editor I work in all day.
Most tools recruiters lean on run on third-party data that's wrong about you within months. When an agent does the searching, it should read something I wrote and stand behind. The version of me worth indexing is the one my agent keeps current.
Discovery, not a feed
So I'm not building a feed. I don't want your daily attention, and I don't want to spend mine moderating it. If someone wants to work with you, they get your offers, your rate, and your contact path, and they go talk to you. The job ends at the introduction.
It's deliberately small. Profile, projects, offers, proof, search, and DMs (more on that later...). I'd rather be useful than big.
How discovery gets better
The first version of discovery is plain on purpose: a directory you can search, backed by profiles that are actually worth reading. That is already better than another feed full of people performing work instead of doing it.
The interesting part comes later, once the directory is big enough. If every profile has projects, proof, skills, offers, rates, and availability, discovery can stop being a keyword search against a bio. A hiring manager should be able to ask for someone who has shipped a desktop app, knows Rust, is open to contract work, and has proof they can finish weird products. A founder should be able to look for an advisor, an early collaborator, or the person who can make the prototype real.
That is where Discover and Pro come in. When the directory has enough good profiles, Discover.me can use AI to build shortlists, vet the fit, and help orchestrate the connection instead of just dumping names on a search results page. Still not a feed. Still not a place you have to post every day. A better way for the right person to find the work you already did, and for serious buyers to reach the people they actually need.
You pay to own your name
The profile is free to exist: a clean page at a private link and an agent-readable version of it. You pay for your name, discover.me/yourname, and a place in the directory. Stop paying and the profile stays reachable, it just drops back to the private link. Your name is held before it returns to the pool, so a missed payment doesn't cost your name.
Profile zero
The first profile on Discover.me is mine. If this platform doesn't work out, you'll be left staring at my resume, which I need eyes on anyway.