Why I built Sixhand

I spent over three months searching for a job. In that time I sent well over 300 applications — each resume tailored to the role, consistently scoring 90 out of 100, matching the requirements, backed by real experience and a solid portfolio. Most of it disappeared into silence, form rejections, or an automated response from an ATS. Not because I wasn't qualified — because somewhere behind the listing, the decision had usually already been made, and the posting itself was often just a formality.

At the same time, as a product designer and developer, my best work — the projects and roles that actually went somewhere — never came from a job board. They came through people: a friend, a former colleague, a client's referral, someone who knew someone. The six-handshakes idea isn't a theory to me — it's how my career has actually worked.

I've also hired freelancers over the years on platforms like Upwork, and even good reviews weren't a guarantee. Someone can have a great track record and still not be right for your project — not because they're dishonest, but because they're not actually interested, or they'll quietly deprioritize your work the moment something bigger comes along. I've been burned that way more than once. A star rating tells you almost nothing about whether someone is genuinely committed to your work, right now.

Nobody is fully protected from that — a bad hire, an unreliable contractor, a listing that goes nowhere. But the closest thing to protection I've found is knowing someone through someone. Not a rating. A real person who can say, honestly, “I've worked with them, they're good.”

LinkedIn doesn't solve this. You can have tens of thousands of connections there and genuinely know almost none of them — at that scale, it's stopped being a network and started acting like Instagram or Twitter: a feed you follow, not people you trust.

Sixhand exists to close that gap. You only add people you genuinely know — people you've worked with, even remotely — because you're willing to vouch for them. And they vouch for the next person, and so on. Every job, project, or service on Sixhand reaches you the same way: through someone you actually know, or someone your network knows.

I want people to find their next job, project, or specialist through someone they trust — not a stranger's inbox. Sixhand is a professional network built for real, strong relationships: a place to talk, discover new openings, take on freelance projects, and find services from people already inside your network.