Resume Rocket

I wanted to be lean with this product, launch early, get feedback, etc.

That meant I had to focus on the core loop and nothing else. So what needs to be there?

• The user can input their details and work/education history.
• The "AI Engine" that writes a great CV.
• A template we can use for the CV and generate a PDF.
• Payments via Stripe.

This means that you can't

• Sign up.
• Edit the CV.
• Choose between multiple templates.
• Have a dark mode.
• Etc, etc, etc.

Most of the work went into the AI Engine. This is built around Open AI, which was new to me, and I spent a lot of time tinkering with prompts and talking prompts with friends.

After spending many evenings in the Chat GPT playground, I learned that:

• ChatGPT 4 is way better than 3.5, but it's slow.
• Chat GPT is way too concise for many tasks. To combat this, you will have to create a plan or outline and then have OpenAI do the different parts individually before you combine them into the final result.
• Context is king. Gather all the top-notch content around what you want to do and supply it as context.
• Have it return JSON for easy processing. Provide the schema in the system prompt. (This was before support for JSON responses was added).

Stripe is awesome. Setting up the checkout is straightforward.

Okay, now we have consumed an alarming amount of coffee and a working product. What now?

Now, we need to get some feedback. How do we do that?

• Leverage your friends and network. I posted in a few group chats with friends, asking them to test it. This is a great way to get some normie feedback.
• Post on Reddit. I started with a post in a smaller job-seeking subreddit. I didn't get a good response from the people there.
• Google Ads. This is a great way to drive traffic. I only did a small campaign for $50 to get some random people in here.

This resulted in about 70 CVs being generated, which is great. Nobody wanted to pay for it, though. But at least we launched early and learned things from the feedback.

• The main feedback from friends and looking at the data was that inputting your details needs to be way easier. This will make more people reach the "wow moment."
• Some people were concerned about privacy.

To validate that this feedback was good, I spent a few days building a feature where the user could upload their existing CV, which generated an immediate increase in CVs.

So what's next?

I want to continue focusing on the inputs section of the process; there is a lot of room for improvement, and it directly increases activation.

I'm also writing content with the goal of starting to drive search engine traffic.