I Spent 8 Months Building a Framer Killer as a Solo Undergrad. Here's What Happened.

Ismail Hossain — Sun, 31 May 2026 04:29:09 +0000

It creates a fully hosted personal portfolio from your resume PDF in under 2 minutes — no coding, no subscriptions, no drama.

Eight months ago, as a Software Engineering undergrad who was tired of watching my classmates either:

Spend a full weekend fighting with Framer or Wix just to build a portfolio nobody would remember, or
Apply to 50 jobs with a black-and-white PDF resume and wonder why they weren't getting callbacks. So I built something about it. And last week, I got my first paying user.

This is the honest story of what I built, why, and what I learned.

The Problem I Couldn't Ignore

Every semester, the same cycle plays out among CS students.

Internship season approaches. Everyone panics about their portfolio. The ambitious ones open Framer or Webflow and spend a weekend on it. The rest submit a PDF and hope for the best.

Here's the thing — the PDF crowd isn't lazy. They're rational. Building a proper personal website from scratch requires skills most job seekers simply don't have time to develop while also job hunting, studying, or freelancing. A personal portfolio is supposed to help you get work, not become a full-time project itself.

I became obsessed with this gap. Why does something so important have to be so hard?

Why Framer Specifically?

Framer is the tool most designers and developers reach for. And it's genuinely impressive software. But using it to build a personal portfolio is like using a professional film camera to take a selfie. The output is great, but the overhead is absurd.

Here's what a typical Framer portfolio setup actually costs a non-designer:

8–12 hours learning the canvas, components, and CMS system
$10/month on a Basic plan just to publish it
$240 over 2 years — assuming you never upgrade
30–60 minutes every time you want to update your projects or job title
Another hour fixing the mobile layout you accidentally broke And at the end of all that effort — you still have to write your own bio, manually input every project, and figure out hosting.

The tool that was supposed to save you time became the bottleneck.

What I Built Instead

I built Talib.

The core idea is aggressively simple: upload your resume PDF → get a live, hosted portfolio website in under 2 minutes.

No canvas. No drag and drop. No design decisions. No hosting configuration. No code.

The workflow looks like this:

Go to talib.me and log in with Google
Upload your resume PDF — or fill in a quick form
The AI parses your professional data — skills, projects, experience, education — automatically
Pick a visual theme: dark mode, neon, minimal, or editorial
Hit Publish That's it. You get a live, mobile-optimized, SEO-ready portfolio at yourname.talib.me — working perfectly on both desktop and mobile, out of the box, with zero configuration.

The AI also writes your bio for you if you're blanking on how to describe yourself — which, honestly, most people are.

🎥 Watch the 2-minute demo here: https://youtu.be/OCMtEAhLTEg?si=xJ9wrqbF9kZwawzr

The 8 Months Nobody Sees

I want to be honest about what 8 months of solo development as a student actually looks like.

It is not a clean, linear journey. It is:

Rebuilding the resume parsing pipeline three times because the AI kept hallucinating project descriptions
Staying up until 2am debugging a deployment issue the night before an exam
Deleting entire features you spent two weeks building because users didn't even notice them
Questioning whether any of it was worth it roughly once a week The version of Talib that exists today is probably the 6th major iteration. The first version was embarrassingly bad. I am glad almost nobody saw it.

How Talib Stacks Up (The Honest Comparison)

Platform	2-Year Cost	Time to Build	Learning Curve	Updates
Framer	$240	8–12 hours	High	Manual rebuild
Wix	$408	3–5 hours	Medium	Manageable
Squarespace	$384	3–5 hours	Medium	Manageable
Kickresume	$192	1–2 hours	Low	Subscription
Talib	$20	2 minutes	Zero	AI-assisted

The $20 is a one-time payment covering 2 full years of hosting. No monthly charges, no "your site goes offline if you forget to renew" anxiety. Just a clean, live portfolio — fully responsive on every device — for people who need one but don't have time to build one.

What Talib Is Not

I want to be clear about what I'm not claiming, because honesty matters more than hype.

Talib is not a Framer replacement for professional designers. If you're a UI/UX designer whose portfolio IS your craft — showing off motion design, complex interactions, and pixel-perfect layouts — Framer is the right tool and the price is justified.

Talib is for everyone else.

The developer who needs a clean portfolio before Friday's application deadline. The fresh graduate who doesn't know CSS. The freelance writer who just needs a professional link. The career changer rebuilding their professional identity who doesn't have a week to spare.

If your goal is to get hired — not to win a design award — Talib gets you there in 2 minutes.

What's Next

Talib is live. It has paying users. And it's nowhere near finished.

Things I'm actively working on:

More theme variety and deeper customization options
Custom domain support — yourname.com instead of yourname.talib.me
Deeper AI personalization beyond bio generation

If you've read this far and you're curious, the product is at talib.me. Try uploading your own resume. The two-minute claim is real.

And if you're a solo builder or student working on something you believe in — keep going. The months where nothing seems to work are not a sign to stop. They're just the part nobody posts about.

Talib linkedin
Ismail LinkedIn

DEV Community: Ismail Hossain