About Us
The GoodApps Company is a small software company in Austin, Texas with one picked fight: the slow rot that turns useful apps into attention traps. The industry has a word for it now — enshittification — and an entire playbook for pretending it’s inevitable.
It isn’t. It’s a series of choices, and we’re making different ones. Here they are, each with a receipt from Career App and MissedTakes, because principles without receipts are just marketing.
What we build by
Consent is the default
Nothing reaches you that you didn’t agree to. Not messages, not recruiters, not tracking scripts.
Career App: On Career App, recruiters can only message members who accept their outreach request, and analytics or advertising cookies are off until a member turns them on — we even honor your browser’s Global Privacy Control signal as a binding no.
MissedTakes: MissedTakes goes further by needing nothing from you at all: there is no account to make, and it sets no advertising or analytics cookies.
No engagement farming
We don’t manufacture reasons to open the app. Attention is a cost we spend carefully, not a crop we harvest.
Career App: Career App has no streaks, no infinite-scroll bait, and reputation points come only from verified events — an organization confirming it hired you, a real coworker vouching for you. Posting volume earns nothing.
MissedTakes: MissedTakes ranks analysts on how much better they did than a naive guess, not on how much they published. Posting more takes cannot move you up.
Ghosting is a bug, not a norm
Silence is the cruelest default in hiring software. Ours punishes it.
Career App: Job listings that leave applicants unanswered too long are automatically hidden from new candidates until the employer responds — even a no counts. Our own support works the same way: resolving a ticket always notifies the person who opened it.
MissedTakes: MissedTakes publishes accuracy figures about named people, so it shipped a corrections channel on its first public day. A correction reaches a person, and a grade we change says so in public.
Your data is yours
You should be able to take everything and leave in an afternoon, without asking permission.
Career App: Career App exports your resume as PDF or Markdown any time, account deletion is self-serve, and salary data you contribute only ever appears in aggregates of five or more people — never individually, to anyone.
MissedTakes: MissedTakes holds nothing of yours to take back — no account, no profile, no history.
Honest by construction
Good behavior shouldn’t depend on our willpower. Where we can, we build the promise into the system so it can’t erode quietly.
Career App: Unsubscribe links work without logging in. The anti-ghosting rule is enforced by code, not policy. This company site sets zero cookies — there’s no banner because there’s nothing to consent to.
MissedTakes: MissedTakes publishes the whole scoring method and shows the arithmetic beside every graded call. Where a result is not in yet, or we simply have not loaded it, the call stays ungraded and the gap is recorded as ours rather than charged to the analyst.
The founder
Ben Garves founded The GoodApps Company in 2026 after fifteen years of building software products inside companies of every size — from managing digital products at Bloomberg, to leading product for USA Today’s Reviewed as Senior Director of Product Management at Gannett, to senior product roles at SolarWinds, Benefitfocus, and Coursera, where he works on user acquisition.
A career spent watching product decisions get made — good ones and the other kind — is exactly what convinced him the trade-offs behind enshittification are optional. Career App is the proof of concept: the network he wished existed every time he was on either side of a job search.
He lives in Austin, Texas, and yes — his resume lives on his Career App profile, where else?
The GoodApps Company, LLC · Austin, Texas · get in touch