CraftedCV
AI Powered Resume Optimization
100 users signed up for my startup without a penny spent on marketing—and all within the first few weeks of launch. Sounds perfect, right? Well, behind the scenes, it was chaos: 2 a.m. debugging sessions, balancing family and a full-time job, and constantly deciding which where to direct my limited energy. Here's the raw, honest journey of launching CraftedCV.io at warp speed.
Immediate Feedback and First Impressions
As soon as CraftedCV.io went live, initial users started trickling in—mostly from my LinkedIn network. Within hours, users started generating ATS-optimized resumes. The excitement was palpable, but the reality quickly set in:
"It worked!" Moments: Friends and early users saw immediate improvements in their resume match scores. Users praised how easy and fast the resume customization process was—confirming the core value proposition.
Early Bugs & Hiccups: One user uploaded a resume with special characters, causing my PDF parser to include those characters in the returned JSON, resulting in errors on the frontend. It took me 3 hours late at night to resolve what initially seemed like a simple issue.
Unexpected Early Wins
Organic Growth: Despite zero marketing spend, CraftedCV.io organically attracted over 100 users in its early weeks purely from word-of-mouth, LinkedIn, and IndieHackers.
Early User Testimonials: Messages from users began highlighting real-world success stories. One user, who had been laid off by a big tech company, sent their CraftedCV resume to a career coach who returned it with numerous positive annotations, reinforcing the product's effectiveness.
Hard Lessons Learned
Launching fast has undeniable advantages, but it came with clear trade-offs:
Time Management: Balancing a full-time job, family, friends, and a personal project is challenging. Maintaining the energy and discipline to work nights and weekends, especially when the project isn't yet profitable, was incredibly tough.
Prioritization Challenges: There's always more to do—new features, optimizations, marketing, and analytics. Learning to constantly prioritize and set boundaries for how much work to do and when was critical but difficult.
Payments & Pricing: The Stripe integration was rushed and needed several tweaks post-launch, causing minor confusion among early paying subscribers.
What Users Loved (and What They Wanted)
Feedback highlighted clearly what was working and where to improve:
Loved: The simplicity, speed, and one-click ease of resume generation. Users clearly appreciated how effortless the service was.
Wanted: Additional resume templates, the ability to modify their newly generated resumes directly on the site before downloading, and clearer guidance or tutorials for maximizing resume scores.
What's Next?
Armed with valuable user insights and clear direction, here's my immediate roadmap:
New Features: Adding a cover letter generator and job application journey tracker to further enhance the job application process.
Expanding Templates: Offering more resume template choices to satisfy user preferences.
Education & Resources: Adding guides and resources to help users leverage CraftedCV to its fullest.
Reflections: Was Rapid Launch the Right Choice?
For me, launching rapidly was absolutely the right choice. It aligns perfectly with my personality—I have a strong bias for action, preferring to act immediately on ideas with minimal planning, and essentially build the airplane as I learn to fly it. CraftedCV.io proved the market demand was real, the product solved real pain points, and users genuinely appreciated the simplicity and effectiveness of the solution.
If you're thinking about launching fast and that matches your style—do it. Users forgive imperfections if the core value is there.
Got questions about rapid launches or CraftedCV.io? Drop them below—I’d love to chat!
Check out CraftedCV.io here and experience effortless resume optimization firsthand.
Launching my startup was a sprint, not a marathon—especially when bootstrapping. In Part 1, I shared how I validated the idea of CraftedCV.io over a weekend. Here’s how the next stage, building, unfolded. It was chaotic, thrilling, and executed in just three weeks.
Week 1: Choosing My Tech
The first week was all about critical decisions. Getting the tech stack right was essential to maintain speed without sacrificing quality.
Front-End Decisions
Framework & Setup: I started with React + TypeScript + Vite using Bolt.new, which initially was amazing due to its rapid prototyping capabilities. But as complexity grew, managing the project in Bolt became challenging.
Hosting: Netlify, which I didn't know of before this project was amazing! It has quick deployments, reliability, built-in CI/CD, oh and loads of features free.
Back-End & Middleware
Sketchy Backend: Make.com was my initial backend because I could create API endpoints and pass the request object to other services without writing any code. It was all about speed.
Database: Supabase integrates with Bolt.new with the click of a button, which was a massive speed boost. Oh and I'd never heard of Supabase before this project!
Payments: Stripe integration was essential from the start to manage subscriptions.
What I Skipped (initially)
Password resets and email verification? Later.
Detailed FAQ? Eventually.
LLC and formal banking? Future me would handle those.
Week 2: Development—From POC to Production
Dodging Prototype Pitfalls
Bolt.new allowed incredibly rapid prototyping, but I soon encountered issues with code rewrites that introduced bugs when the pages got more complex. Shifting to GitHub and Cursor IDE was a lifesaver, allowing better code management and fewer headaches.
Middleware Magic with C#
To securely route requests and manage authentication, I developed a lean middleware API layer in C#. Requests were routed to the C# API and then if needed, to Make.com endpoints. This allowed for authenticating requests between the front and back ends. Additionally the C# API is hosted on Azure Container Apps was chosen for how quickly I could build and deploy with "az acr build" from the command line so there was no need for a real CI/CD pipeline.
Week 3: Panic Mode and Final Touches
SendGrid Nightmare
I signed up for SendGrid and had my account promptly shut down withing 24 hours because they thought I was a fraud. After communicating that indeed I was a real person, they reinstated my account a day later. I then encountered issues integrating it with Supabase for triggering email verification and forgot password emails. The details of how I fixed this are hazy as much of it was done between 11 pm and 2 am over multiple nights.
Launching Live
Monday morning February 17th, President's day arrived. With a mix of anxiety and excitement, I published my LinkedIn post ever announcing CraftedCV.io. Users began signing up almost immediately. Most of these were people I personally knew but it was still fun. CraftedCV.io was now officially alive!
Was the Chaos Worth It?
Absolutely. Building fast forced clear decisions, kept momentum high, and was a rush. Users cared about results—not the missing FAQ page.
Stay tuned for Part 3: The launch aftermath—what users loved, what broke immediately, and the invaluable feedback that shaped CraftedCV.io’s future.
(Ready to fix your resume effortlessly? Try CraftedCV now: https://craftedcv.io)
"If your resume was a Tinder profile, would anyone swipe right?" That's what I jokingly asked myself while manually tweaking my resume for the hundredth time. But in reality, the process wasn't funny at all—it was tedious, repetitive, and frustrating.
The Real Problem
Every job seeker knows the pain: tweaking resumes endlessly, hoping to get past the infamous Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Sure, tools like Jobscan exist. They even tell you how closely your resume matches a job description and suggest improvements. But there's one glaring issue—they don’t actually fix your resume for you. You're left doing all the work yourself.
One night, staring at my screen, I thought, "Why can't it just do this for me?" That simple idea became the seed of something exciting.
Market Gap & Initial Validation
Digging deeper, I noticed a surprising gap: Most resume builders don't automatically optimized resumes based directly on specific job descriptions. Current tools required manual editing—exactly what I was trying to avoid.
I bounced the idea off some friends and the response was unanimous: "Dude, I need this yesterday."
Another crucial step for validation was testing with Jobscan.co. I uploaded one of my resumes to Jobscan and noted its match score. Then, I took that same resume and ran it through my CraftedCV proof of concept (POC), generating a new, optimized resume. I uploaded this new resume back into Jobscan, and every single time, the score improved by 5 to 25 points. It was clear evidence that my AI-driven approach was working, confirming I was directionally accurate.
Motivated by this strong validation, I built a quick POC over the weekend. By Sunday evening, three friends were already testing it. Watching their excitement—and relief—as my simple tool saved them hours was exhilarating. The pain was real, and CraftedCV.io had the potential to fix it.
Enter CraftedCV.io
CraftedCV.io became a one-click resume optimizer: You upload your existing resume and a job description, and it instantly generates an ATS-friendly resume tailored specifically for that job. No more manual tweaks, keyword guessing, or ATS anxiety.
In just one weekend, the idea was validated: three friends became early users, the prototype worked, and I knew I had something real.
Now the big question: could I build this into a real product—and do it fast enough to keep the momentum?
Stay tuned for Part 2, where I'll dive into exactly how I turned this weekend project into a production-ready, AI-driven app in only three weeks.
Next up: Tech stack, sleepless nights, and some questionable choices.
(Want a sneak peek? Check out CraftedCV.io and see what it can do to your resume.)
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Supported Chinese?
THanks for sharing.-
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Great question and to be honest I haven't tested it out on other languages. Would you mind testing that and letting me know how it goes?
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i like it
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Thanks for the feedback!
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The Jobscan validation is a smart move.
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Appreciate it! It was the only way I could think of to validate if I was really on to something without a bunch of users testing it out. Have you given the site a shot?
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Hey Indie Hackers,
I’m Michael, a solo entrepreneur who spent my evenings and weekends building CraftedCV.io—my first-ever product! I’m not a flashy Silicon Valley founder with a massive team. It’s just me, a laptop, and a drive to solve a massive pain point: applying to jobs sucks.
If you’re like me, you’ve spent way too many hours tinkering with your resume for each new job posting, only to wonder if some ATS robot is going to ghost you. That’s why I built Crafted CV—an AI-powered resume writer that rewrites your resume based on the job description and optimizes it for those pesky applicant tracking systems. All in one click.
🔥 The Pain Point
• ⏳ Time Drain: Rewriting your resume for every job you apply to can take hours. With economic uncertainty, more people are mass-applying, which leads to generic resumes → 0 interviews.
• 🤖 ATS Nightmares: If the ATS doesn’t like your formatting or keywords, you’re out before you even start.
• 😤 Frustration Overload: Not hearing back, or getting a “We decided to go another direction” after all that work.
💡 My Solution
Let’s cut the fluff and talk about the real value:
1️⃣ Simplicity – Paste your current resume, paste the job description. Click a button. Boom—AI rewrites it to match what the employer’s looking for.
2️⃣ ATS Optimization – No guesswork on keywords or formatting. The AI reformats and optimizes to keep those black-hole ATS systems happy.
3️⃣ Speed – Instead of taking hours or days, you can knock out multiple targeted resumes in minutes. That’s a 10x (or more) productivity boost.
🎯 Why I Built This
I’ve applied for dozens of jobs in the past, and each one demanded a different spin on my “experience.” I got tired of rewriting the same lines to match new keywords.
So I thought, “Why not automate the rewriting process?”
That’s how Crafted CV was born.
🔍 Where You Come In
I’m not here to brag about insane revenue or MRR (yet!). This is still a side project, and I’m looking for honest feedback and a handful of beta testers to help me shape the product.
🚀 What I Need From You
• Your unfiltered opinion on the user experience and AI output.
• Features you’d love to see (cover letters, LinkedIn optimization, etc.).
• Any bugs or quirks you notice while testing.
🎁 What You Get
• Free early access to the product (obviously).
• Direct line to me (literally my personal email) for suggestions.
• The satisfaction of helping a fellow Indie Hacker (and your future job-seeking self) crush it in the job market.
📢 Interested?
✅ Check out CraftedCV.io
✅ Interested in beta testing? Drop a comment or DM me!
I’ll be hanging here in the comments to answer any questions. Seriously—nothing is off the table. I’m pumped to finally show this to the world, and I’d love your input to make it better.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for helping me make job applications a little less soul-crushing!
— Michael (the entire dev/marketing/support team rolled into one)
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hey, this is a wonderful idea. I have dealt with trying to get through ATS, I have used Jobscan, and I would love to have something that can do all the CV optimization for me. So, I definitely support your idea and I'd be happy to participate in the beta.
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Yes, the pain of putting time into a resume only to never get any interviews is so frustrating. The ATS systems really do weed out a lot of good candidates.
The site went from idea to launch in 3 weeks so there is plenty more to do before it is ready for prime time but I think you'll find it'll save you tons of time applying to jobs. Much of the feedback I've been getting is that the website is easy to use, really improves resumes, and increases the rate that people can apply to jobs. Additionally, I just hired another developer to help me build the site even faster. We make updates almost every night.
When you sign up at CraftedCV.io select the $40 monthly plan and there will be a place to enter a promo code, use BETATESTER40. It'll give you the first two months free. You can cancel any time or downgrade to the free plan. When you've used the site a bit, please leave me any good or bad feedback in this form: https://michaelhtownsend.outgrow.us/michaelhtownsendCopy-of-custom-ai-craftedcv-beta-feedback-survey-1.
Seriously any feedback is appreciated and I hope you find CraftedCV useful.
Additionally, if you run into problems, which is a real probability as the site is only a month old, email me at townsendtechllc@gmail.com. I’m still working on the site each night so you should see progress on your feedback quickly.
Lastly, I originally only wanted 50 beta testers but I hit that in one week so I'm shooting for 200 now. Do you know anyone else who might be interested and would you feel comfortable introducing us or forwarding this information around, no pressure though.
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These comments are brutal. Good job on the launch. I also have a product I`m planning to launch but I don't think I`m ready for the strong mouthed people to comment on it:))
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I get that. I was nervous about feedback and I’ve tried to view all feedback as positive even if it doesn’t sound positive. It either helps Mr build a better product or refine some aspect of the business. I’ve always heard that customers will tell you what you need to do so I’ve been trying to view feedback through that lens.
Anyway I hope you go for it and launch!
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Since you are looking for feedback, that's what I'm gonna try to do.
Congrats on launching and posting it here, that is indeed a huge step indeed.
Even if the tool can potentially have a huge benefit for people, opening the website and looking at such a default template makes me think whoever is behind it doesn't care enough. So I strongly suggest that if you don't have the design chops, use one of the amazing AI design tools that we currently have (Lovable, v0, a Figma plugin) and make it look a little bit more unique and interesting to the eye!
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Thank you for taking a look at my site and giving feedback, seriously really appreciate it!
While I am a full stack developer I definitely don’t have design expertise. Can you elaborate on what about my site seems templated or what I can do to improve it? I’m curious to evolve it because I actually didn’t use a template. I used Bolt dot new to build the initial version and then I would give screenshots to ChatGPT and use its advise to iterate over it. I agree that the site doesn’t feel super unique but if something specific stood out to you as to what you would want to see instead, I’d really enjoy knowing.
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The first thing I noticed is that your visitors don't have a single way to contact you. No chat, no contact form, no email. I would add at least one option to get in touch with you. Chat is the easiest way for your visitors.
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Really appreciate you visiting my site and providing feedback! My site went from ideation to launch in 3-4 weeks and I overlooked things like this. I've implemented a Contact page as well as a footer for reaching out to me and better site navigation. Thanks again!
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