I built a tool to streamline judging applications for O-1A visa candidates

Applying for the O-1A visa requires satisfying at least 3 out of 8 criteria, and one of the most approachable is “judging the work of others.” But actually getting credible judging opportunities—and tracking them—is tedious and unstructured.

When I was working on my petition, I spent way too much time manually searching for hackathons and competitions, writing cold emails, and organizing responses. It felt like a bad CRM built in Google Sheets.

To solve this, I built https://judging.exalien.club — a lightweight tool to discover relevant events, apply to judge, and track your outreach. It also generates email drafts tailored for each event.

I originally built this just to help myself, but figured it might save others some time too.

Would love feedback—or to hear how others handled this part of their O-1A process.