Code Submit

Dominic was a hiring manager at an early-stage tech company in Munich; Tracy was a tech recruiter at another startup. Both experienced the same pain point: managing take-home coding challenges was a nightmare. They'd send candidates Google Docs with prompts, candidates would have questions, recruiters couldn't answer them, and the whole process was fragmented across email and manual coordination. One weekend, Dom sat down and built the very first version of Code Submit to scratch their itch, working with Tracy's input from her recruiting process.

The MVP came together in just 2-3 weeks. It was ugly—no login, no account creation, no billing. "There was no login. There was no account creation. Like you would have to set up everything by hand," Tracy recalls. But the core functionality was there: get the challenge to the candidate with minimal friction, then assess it. With this barely-functional product, they pitched it to their own companies and networks, landing their first 4-5 customers. Then the grind began: nights and weekends for the next 6-12 months, every evening after work, every weekend, every public holiday. Dom and Tracy were both fortunate to have well-paying tech jobs that allowed them to fund this effort, and crucially, they were doing it together. As Tracy noted, having a spouse who believes in the vision and burns the midnight oil alongside you is a massive advantage.

Their first customers came from warm outreach within their professional networks—people they already knew had the problem. But then they tried to scale. They attempted paid ads, forum communities, and cold outbound sales. They even created "sales happy hour"—Friday evenings from 7-9pm where they'd cold-call hiring managers on LinkedIn. It was demotivating and didn't work. Meanwhile, Tracy had started writing on Medium. One article about take-home challenges performed surprisingly well and drove signups, showing that content could work. When they joined TinySeed and got access to the mastermind group, they met Kevin and Pierre from Scraping Bee, who were seeing huge success with SEO and content marketing. That insight was the catalyst.

The hockey-stick moment came around February 2021 when they committed fully to SEO and content marketing. "We realized that the acquisition channel that started to work very well for us was SEO. And we started to take SEO very seriously and started to invest, double down, invest a lot of time into content marketing, into our SEO rankings," Dom explains. They pulled back from paid ads and cold outreach and laser-focused on ranking for relevant keywords. The timing was fortuitous: COVID had forced companies to adopt remote and asynchronous interviewing, exactly when Code Submit was positioned to capture that search traffic. They achieved consistent 10-15% month-over-month growth, and inbound leads started arriving—hiring managers from Apple, Netflix, Audi, and the U.S. Air Force signed up organically. Rather than cold-calling, they'd see a Netflix employee sign up and reach out warmly to help them get started. These relationships turned into major customers without aggressive sales tactics.

Code Submit is a team of about 8 people (including contractors) and profitable. They've built a library of 65+ coding challenges across languages and frameworks—most focused on real-world work like React, Django, and Rails rather than algorithmic trick questions. They're ambitious but grounded: they aim to hit $10M ARR over the next couple of years, but they're doing it as a sustainable, profitable "lifestyle business" (a term they've reframed positively). Working as a married couple has been an unexpected superpower—alignment on family and company goals, mutual support through the emotional rollercoaster, and shared ownership. Tracy and Dom have proven that you don't need venture funding or a hypergrowth sales playbook to build a meaningful, life-changing company.