Will Robots Take My Job

Mubashar Iqbal joined the Freelance.tv Slack group about two months before launch and was approached by Tim Matar, a developer in Bulgaria who had seen Mubashar's prolific work on Product Hunt. Rather than immediately jumping into a large project together, they decided to start small—a way to test their collaboration style before committing to something bigger. Tim had recently come across a 2013 Oxford research report that analyzed 700 jobs and the skills associated with them, looking at automation risk. The idea was simple: make that research interactive and accessible.

Despite being in different countries (Mubashar in North America, Tim in Bulgaria), they conducted the entire project through Slack—no calls, no video hangouts, just asynchronous communication. Mubashar handled the backend and frontend development using his go-to stack: Laravel for PHP, jQuery and Vue.js for the frontend, and DigitalOcean for hosting. The scope was intentionally small, which allowed them to move fast. Mubashar's philosophy of not chasing perfection and his experience building 20+ projects meant he could identify what was truly "good enough" and launch rather than over-engineer.

They decided Product Hunt would be their launch vehicle. Mubashar had learned from past launches that Product Hunt itself might not be the biggest traffic driver, but it serves as a signal to press, influencers, and other distribution channels. When they launched WillRobotsTakeMyJob.com on Product Hunt, it gained significant traction.

The results were staggering. The project hit #1 and #2 on Product Hunt and generated 6 million page views in less than three weeks. What's remarkable is where most of that traffic came from: MSN and AOL—not tech-forward platforms, but mainstream outlets that discovered the project through press coverage. Mubashar hadn't pitched press directly until after launch; journalists found it through Product Hunt and ran stories on their own. This validated his strategy: launch on Product Hunt first to gain legitimacy, then the press coverage follows naturally. The site became a cultural moment, tapping into real anxiety about job automation at exactly the right time.

The project stands as a case study in Mubashar's approach to side projects: start with a real pain point or curiosity (automation anxiety), partner with someone hungry and thoughtful, keep scope tight, launch fast, and let the market tell you if you built something worthwhile. While it may not have monetized into a major revenue stream, it demonstrated that two developers in different countries could ship something meaningful in two months and reach millions of people through strategic platform choice.