Month 1 of 12: shipped Draftly — Gmail drafts for job search outreach
Hey IH đź‘‹
I'm running a personal experiment: one startup per month for 12 months, inspired by Pieter Levels. Goal isn't a perfect product — it's to ship, measure activation, and learn fast.
Month 1 is live: Draftly → https://www.draftly.buzz
## The problem (lived it myself)
While job hunting, I kept getting better results from friendly emails directly to companies than from another LinkedIn application. The bottleneck wasn't motivation — it was the mental load of writing unique messages over and over.
## What I built
- City-based company search — find smaller/local businesses that don't post jobs on big boards
- AI-personalized email drafts from your bio + each company
- Gmail drafts — you review, attach CV, send yourself (no bulk auto-send)
## Business model (simple on purpose)
- 5 free credits on signup
- €5 → 15 credits (Gumroad)
- 1 credit = 1 draft
Infra cost today: ~€0 (Vercel + Supabase + Gemini/GCP on free tiers). Stack is intentionally boring: Next.js + Supabase + API calls per draft.
## Launch week so far
- Product Hunt âś“
- LinkedIn + YouTube demo âś“
- r/SideProject âś“
- X (Twitter) âś“
- Now here — looking for feedback from people who've shipped small SaaS wedges
90s demo: https://youtu.be/2ejfvR0u0rI
## What I'd love from this community
1. Does the job-search outreach wedge feel real, or too niche?
2. Would you pay per draft / credit pack, or does pricing need to change?
3. What would you fix in the first 7 days if this were yours?
Brutal honesty welcome. I'll share a "month 1 retrospective" either way — traction or not.
Thanks for reading 🙏
Nice first-month launch. I like that you focused on a specific pain point instead of trying to build an all-in-one job search tool. I'd be curious to see whether users value the city-based company discovery or the AI draft generation more—that insight could help guide future development. Good luck with the 12-month challenge!
This is a strong wedge because it targets a very specific bottleneck rather than the entire job search workflow. The insight that “applications aren’t hard, writing is” is exactly where small tools can outperform platforms—especially when they reduce cognitive load instead of just generating more outputs.