DEV Community: Johnu Marattil

I Built a Social Post Engine to Escape the Canva-Export-Schedule Loop

Johnu Marattil — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:30:22 +0000

As a solo founder running WahResume.com, I was spending way too much time on social media - not on creativity, but on process.
Same templates. Same brand assets. Same hashtags. Every post meant opening Canva, exporting, uploading, scheduling… and repeating it the next day.

So I built something to fix that.

Social Post Engine is a small tool that helps me stay consistent on social media without having to touch Canva or an endless queue of schedulers.

Here’s what it does:

✅ Seed & review topics in one command — it researches, outlines, and preps your next posts.
✅ Pre-generates branded images from templates (checklists, stat cards, charts, comparisons). It also writes captions in your brand’s voice using AI.
✅ Publishes automatically to LinkedIn and Instagram via a browser session.
✅ Runs on a timer, so your content goes live without you needing to think about it.

What started as a personal hack has grown into something that actually works — and saved me from the daily grind.

I’ve open-sourced it in case it helps other indie hackers, solo founders, or small teams trying to stay consistent without burning time.

You can drop in a simple config file with your brand details (like logo, fonts, hashtags, tone), and everything else runs on autopilot.

There’s still plenty to improve, but it’s already freeing up hours each week.

GitHub link in comments.
If it works for you, leave a ⭐ and share it with someone who might find it useful.

How I built multi-currency pricing for my SaaS in half a day (and why more products should)

Johnu Marattil — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:04:47 +0000

I was staring at my visitor analytics dashboard when it hit me.

18% of my visitors at WahResume were from India. All of them seeing prices in USD.

Think about that for a second.

You're a job seeker in Mumbai, already stressed about finding work, and you land on a tool that could help - but the price shows "$10/month."

Now your brain goes into overdrive:

What's the exchange rate?
Will my bank charge conversion fees?
Is this even worth the hassle?

You leave. Maybe you come back later. Probably you don't.

The Competitor Gap

I checked competitors like Rezi.ai and Jobscan.co. None of them offered multi-currency pricing based on location.

Which made sense, honestly. Creating separate prices for every currency is tedious - we're talking hundreds of price configurations across plans and billing cycles.

But I couldn't shake the feeling that I was leaving money (and trust) on the table.

What I Built

So I added them. 52 currencies. Four purchasing power parity tiers so pricing feels fair whether you're in Toronto or Lagos - with automatic detection based on the visitor's location.

Half a day of work. Claude helped me write the scripts to automate the Stripe setup. Now visitors from 64 countries see prices in their own currency. Clean, familiar, no mental math required.

Why Not Just Wait?

Stripe is launching Adaptive Pricing in 2026 to solve this automatically.

But my users needed it now.

The Takeaway

Sometimes the best UX improvements aren't features. They're removing friction you didn't know existed.

If you want the full technical breakdown - how I structured the PPP tiers, automated Stripe price creation, and handled geo-detection - I wrote a deeper dive here:

Read the full technical breakdown on Medium

I'm building WahResume, an AI-powered resume builder helping 5,000+ job seekers land interviews. If you're shipping a global SaaS product, I'd love to hear how you handle localized pricing - drop a comment below.

I Used Programmatic SEO to Grow My AI Resume Builder from 0 to 5,000+ Users - Here's What Actually Worked (and What Backfired)

Johnu Marattil — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:43:32 +0000

Last year, I launched WahResume - an AI-powered resume builder - as a side project during my Master's program. Today it serves 5,000+ users, generates $600 CAD in monthly recurring revenue, and runs almost entirely on autopilot.

One person. No co-founder. No marketing team. No VC money.

I'm writing this because the honest version of this story doesn't exist online. You'll find plenty of "how I hit $10K MRR" posts. You won't find many that break down the exact systems behind the growth. So here's all of it.

Why I built it

I'm a product designer, not a marketer or a backend engineer by training. I built WahResume because every resume tool I tried either charged $30/month for basic AI features or produced cookie-cutter output that wouldn't survive an ATS scan. I knew I could design something better.

The product came together fast. The problem was everything after that. I had maybe 10-15 daily visitors, mostly friends and classmates. Classic builder's trap - great product, zero distribution.

The one-man-team reality

Let me be clear about what "solo founder" actually means day to day. I'm the designer, the developer, the copywriter, the SEO strategist, the customer support rep, and the guy fixing deployment issues at midnight. There's no "growth team." There's me, a wall of browser tabs, and a growing collection of automations held together with cron jobs and sheer stubbornness.

This isn't a humble brag. It's a constraint that forced every decision I made. When you're one person, you can't do things the "right" way. You have to find the highest-leverage moves and automate everything else, or you drown.

That constraint shaped the entire growth strategy.

Building the automation layer

Early on, I realized that if I spent my time manually writing blog posts, doing keyword research, and sending outreach emails, I'd never ship product improvements. So I built three systems that changed everything.

Automated research and blog posting

I built a pipeline that pulls trending job market data, identifies high-volume search queries in the careers space, and drafts a blog - I review and edit before publishing, but the pipeline handles the 80% that used to eat my weekends.

The system pulls from job boards, salary aggregators, and industry reports, then structures the data into articles targeting queries like "how to write a data analyst resume in 2026" or "top skills for product managers." Each post gets auto-formatted with internal links back to relevant WahResume tools.

At peak, this pipeline was publishing 3-4 quality posts per week. That would've taken me 15-20 hours manually. The automation cut it to about 2 hours of review and editing.

Automated outreach pipeline

Cold outreach is soul-crushing when done by hand. So I didn't do it by hand.

I built a lightweight outreach system that identifies career coaches, university career centers, and HR bloggers who might benefit from recommending a free resume tool to their audience. The system personalizes each message based on the recipient's content and audience, queues them up, and sends them in batches.

This is how I landed partnerships with university career centers - not by blasting 500 identical emails, but by automating the research and personalization so each message actually felt intentional. The system handles the tedious work; I step in once someone responds.

It's not a spam cannon. The response rate hovers around 8-12%, which is strong for cold outreach, because every message references something specific about the recipient's work.

Programmatic SEO at scale

This was the big bet. Thousands of people search for role-specific resume help every day - "marketing manager resume example," "nurse practitioner resume template." Instead of writing individual pages, I built a system that generates targeted pages combining resume templates, career guides, salary data, and ATS keyword recommendations for each job title.

Over a few weeks, I generated 30,000+ pages programmatically. Each one targeted a specific role or career query.

The hockey stick (briefly)

It worked. Daily visitors went from under 100 to 700. Google was indexing the pages, ranking them for long-tail keywords, and driving real signups from people I'd never spoken to. Combined with the blog pipeline feeding mid-funnel content and the outreach bringing in referral traffic, growth felt effortless.

For about six weeks.

The lightweight architecture that makes solo possible

Running all of this alone only works because the tech stack is deliberately minimal.

WahResume is a Next.js app deployed on Vercel. I chose this stack not because it's trendy, but because it lets me move fast without the overhead of infrastructure. Vercel handles scaling, edge caching, and deployments. I don't manage servers. I don't think about load balancers. I push code, it's live in 90 seconds.

The AI layer calls OpenAI's API for resume generation, tailoring, and mock interviews. No fine-tuned models, no GPU instances. Just clean API calls with well-engineered prompts that took weeks to dial in.

The automation pipelines - blog, outreach, SEO monitoring - run on simple scheduled scripts. No complex orchestration frameworks, no Kubernetes, no message queues. Just cron jobs that do their thing and ping me on Slack if something breaks.

Total infrastructure cost: under $100/month. Hosting, AI API calls, email sending, analytics - all of it. When your MRR is $600 and your burn is under $100, you have a real business, not a money pit waiting for the next funding round.

Every dependency I add is a dependency I maintain alone. So the bar for adding complexity is very high.

Where it stands today

5,000+ registered users
$600 CAD MRR
400-600 daily visitors (down from peak, but converting 5x better)
Infrastructure cost: ~$100/month
Team size: 1

These aren't unicorn numbers. But for a bootstrapped, solo-built SaaS with zero ad spend, they represent something that actually works - a product people pay for, grown and maintained by one person who automated the right things.

What I'd tell you if you're starting out

Automate distribution before you automate features. The best product in the world loses to a mediocre product with better reach. Build the content and outreach pipelines before you polish the UI.

Start programmatic SEO with 500 pages, not 30,000. Validate that your template ranks and converts before you go all in. I learned this the expensive way.

Every automated output still needs a human pass. My blog pipeline drafts posts - I review every one. My outreach system writes emails - I read them before they send. Automation handles volume. Quality is still on you.

Keep your stack boring. Next.js, Vercel, Postgres, and some API calls. That's it. Every shiny dependency you add is a weekend you'll spend debugging it instead of talking to users.

Conversion matters more than traffic. 700 visitors at 0.1% conversion is worse than 300 visitors at 1%. Build the funnel before the traffic machine.

What's next

I'm continuing to grow WahResume while actively job hunting as a Senior Product Designer - yes, the founder of a resume builder still needs to job hunt. The irony keeps me honest.

The focus now is on improving the AI tailoring engine, expanding mock interview capabilities, and scaling university partnerships. The automation layer runs the growth engine. My time goes into making the product genuinely better.

If you're building something similar or want to dig into the specifics of programmatic SEO, outreach automation, or running a SaaS solo - drop a comment. I learned most of this the hard way, and I'd rather someone else didn't have to.

I'm Johnu - product designer, solo founder, and the entire team behind WahResume. I'm also building UrVote, a blockchain-based voting platform. Find me on LinkedIn.

WahResume: AI-Powered Resume Builder for Job Seekers

Johnu Marattil — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 01:24:36 +0000

Introducing WahResume: Your AI-Powered Career Companion 🚀

Looking for your next dream job? Let me introduce you to WahResume, an innovative AI-powered resume builder designed to help job seekers stand out in today's competitive market.

What Makes WahResume Special?

✨ AI-Driven Content Generation - Smart suggestions for skills, experience descriptions, and industry-specific keywords

📊 ATS-Optimized Templates - Ensures your resume gets past Applicant Tracking Systems

🎨 Professional Designs - Multiple templates tailored for different industries

⚡ Real-Time Optimization - Get instant feedback on your resume's effectiveness

Why I Built This Tool

As a developer who has been through countless job applications, I understand the pain of crafting the perfect resume. Traditional resume builders often lack the intelligence to suggest relevant content or optimize for modern hiring processes.

WahResume leverages AI to:

Analyze job descriptions and suggest relevant skills
Optimize content for ATS compatibility
Provide industry-specific recommendations
Generate compelling achievement statements

Key Features

Smart Content Suggestions: AI analyzes your background and suggests improvements
Keyword Optimization: Automatically includes relevant industry keywords
Multiple Export Formats: PDF, Word, and web-friendly versions
Real-time Preview: See changes instantly as you edit
Mobile Responsive: Edit your resume on any device

Try It Out!

Ready to transform your job search? Check out WahResume at wahresume.com

What's Next?

I'm continuously improving the platform based on user feedback. Upcoming features include:

Cover letter generation
LinkedIn profile optimization
Interview preparation tools
Job matching recommendations

Have you used AI tools for job hunting? What features would you find most valuable in a resume builder? Let me know in the comments below! 👇

JobSearch #CareerDevelopment #AITools #ResumeBuilder