CertifyALot

Six months ago, we noticed something that bothered us enough to build a product around it.

Trainers in India — yoga instructors, spoken English coaches, soft skills trainers, corporate workshop hosts — are brilliant at what they do inside the classroom. But every single batch ends the same way. The training finishes on Friday. Students start messaging by Saturday morning. And the trainer is still at their desk on Sunday night doing this:

Open Canva. Duplicate the template. Type the first student's name. Export as PDF. Rename the file. Repeat for 80, 100, sometimes 150 students.

Not because they want to. Because nothing better existed for them specifically.

The tools they were using were never built for this

We looked at everything trainers were hacking together:

Canva — great for design, terrible for bulk. You can't upload a student list. You duplicate manually or use a workaround that breaks after 20 rows.

Word mail merge — technically works, but the setup is painful, formatting breaks constantly, and one wrong field mapping ruins the entire batch.

Google Slides + Autocrat — a Google Sheets script that trainers found on YouTube. Works until it doesn't. No preview, no error handling, no support when it breaks at midnight before a deadline.

Zapier automations — overkill for someone who just wants to send certificates after a workshop. Requires 3 tools, a paid plan, and 2 hours of setup every time.

LMS platforms — built for ongoing courses, not one-time certificate batches. Like buying a truck to deliver one parcel.

Every solution was a workaround. None of them was built for the actual workflow: I have a design, I have a student list, I want certificates. That's it.

What we built

CertifyALot does exactly that and nothing more.

Upload your existing certificate design — the one you already have, no redesign needed. Upload your student list from Excel or CSV — fields auto-mapped from your column headers. Preview 5 sample certificates with real student names before generating anything. Hit generate. Get a ZIP delivered to your email with every certificate inside.

100 certificates in under 5 minutes.

We made a few deliberate decisions that go against what most SaaS tools do:

No subscription. Trainers run batches, not daily workflows. Charging a monthly fee for something used 4-6 times a year felt wrong. Credits never expire — buy when you need, use anytime.

No forced templates. Every trainer already has a certificate design they're proud of. We didn't want to make them start over. Bring your own design, we handle the rest.

No student data storage. Details are used only to generate certificates and deleted after. Trainers are protective of their student relationships and they should be.

Where we are right now

Three co-founders, based in Chennai, six months in.

The product works. The workflow is live. Free trial gives you 100 certificates with no credit card.

Getting the first users has been harder than building the product, which is probably the most common thing said on Indie Hackers and the most true thing we've experienced. Reddit posts with 1.5k views and active comments about the exact pain we solve — and still crickets on signups. Meta ads with thousands of impressions and hundreds of landing page visits — and still no conversions.

We're figuring it out. This post is part of that.

If you're a trainer or you know trainers who run batches, we'd love for you to try it. Free trial at certifyalot.com, no card required.

And if you've been through this stage — zero users, product ready, distribution not working — we'd genuinely love to hear what finally moved the needle for you.

Honest ask

We're not looking for hype. We're looking for people who actually run training batches to tell us what's missing, what's confusing, or what would make this an obvious yes for them.

If that's you — try it and tell us what you think. Even brutal feedback is useful at this stage.

Thanks for reading. 🙏

— Arvind, Arul & Sabari Co-founders, CertifyALot · certifyalot.com