4 months in: 1,350 users, $200 MRR
Hello hackers,
Back in December I posted here about launching JobSprout, my AI CV and cover letter builder. A lot of you gave feedback (and a few good roasts). Four months later, here's the honest scoreboard.
The numbers:
1,350 users
$200 MRR
500k Google search impressions
Now let me tell you what those numbers actually mean, because the headline hides the real story.
1,350 users and $200 MRR is roughly a 2% conversion rate. People show up, build a CV, download it, and leave. The product works. The funnel does not. That gap has been the entire focus of the last two months, and I still haven't fully cracked it.
What I got wrong:
I assumed "instant previews and proper typesetting" would sell themselves. They don't. Most people can't tell you why a CV looks professional, they just feel it. So leading with Typst and client-side compilation was me selling the engineering, not the outcome. Nobody wakes up wanting LaTeX. They want the interview.
I also priced at $7/month thinking cheap would convert. Turns out a job search is a 3 week panic, not a yearly subscription. People want their CV, they want it now, and they don't want a recurring charge hanging around after they get hired. I'm now testing a one-time "export pack" alongside the subscription. Early signs say this was the actual blocker, not the price.
What surprised me:
The 500k search impressions came from blog posts I almost didn't write. SEO is brutally slow and you feel insane publishing into the void for months, but it compounds. Most of my signups now come from someone Googling "how to tailor a CV for a specific job" at 11pm and landing on something I wrote. That traffic costs me nothing and it keeps growing.
The other surprise: the AI feature people love isn't the one I expected. I built a "select text, tell it what to do" assistant so it wouldn't nuke your whole document. Everyone uses it for one thing, rewriting a bullet point to sound less like a robot. So I'm leaning all the way into that.
Where I'm stuck (genuinely asking):
How do you convert a high-intent, low-frequency user? Someone who needs you intensely for two weeks and then ideally never again because they got the job. That's a great outcome for them and a terrible one for MRR.
If you've built something people use once and use hard, I'd love to hear what worked. Pay-per-export? Lifetime deals? Something I'm not seeing?
