The problem
Search for a job from the Pohutukawa Coast on the big boards and you get the whole of Auckland dumped on you at once. Warehouse roles in Penrose. Office jobs in the CBD. The cafe ten minutes from your house is somewhere on page six, if it listed at all.
That order is backwards for anyone who actually lives out here. The commute over the motorway is the thing most people are trying to avoid. The jobs worth seeing first are the ones down the road.
Nobody was going to build that for one coast. The catchment is too small for the big players to bother with. So Nick built it himself.
What got built
Snagged has three working parts: search, listings and applications. Employers post roles. Job hunters search, read and apply. Nothing exotic, and that is the point. A job site earns its keep by being fast and clear, not clever.
The ordering is the product. Local employer listings come up first. National results sit underneath, so you still see the wider market, you just see your own patch before it. Nothing gets hidden. The coast gets top billing.
Beside the search sit the CV and cover letter tools. Most people find a listing they want and then remember their CV is three jobs out of date. On Snagged the fix is right there. Find the role, sort the CV, write the letter, apply. One place, one sitting.
The calls that mattered
Local first is a sort rule, not a wall. The obvious version shows coast jobs only. That reads well in a pitch and fails in practice, because some weeks there are only a handful of local roles, and an empty results page kills a job site faster than anything. Showing national results after the local ones keeps the page useful on quiet weeks and keeps the local promise on busy ones.
Putting the CV tools beside the search was the other call. The standard move is a separate section with its own menu item and its own page. But nobody wakes up wanting to write a cover letter. They want the job. The tools live next to the listings because that is the moment people actually need them.
The film
The brand film was written, shot and cut at the same desk as the site. Script, camera, edit, all Nick's work.
That was not a stunt. Tea Break Studio does the build and the film work that goes with it, and Snagged is the proof both can come out of one room in east Auckland. When someone asks whether the studio can handle video as well as code, the answer is playing at snagged.co.nz.
Why build your own
Client work has a finish line. You build it, you hand it over, you invoice. Your own product never finishes. Every slow page is yours. Every confusing label is yours. Every person who starts an application and gives up halfway is telling you something, and there is no client to pass the note to.
That is why Snagged matters beyond the coast. It is the job where Nick is the builder, the client and the support desk all at once. Decisions get tested in public, not in a stakeholder meeting. The habits that come out of that are plain wording, fast pages and ruthless cutting of steps. The same habits go into every client build at Tea Break Studio.
Shipping your own product teaches things client work cannot. Snagged is that lesson, live and working.
Where it landed
Snagged shipped and is live at snagged.co.nz, search, listings, applications, CV tools, brand film and all.