Hey everyone, this is my first time posting on dev.to so not entirely sure how this will land, but I wanted to share something I’ve been building quietly for the past few months. I’m a solo founder (and honestly a part-time everything: backend dev, product manager, QA, customer support, marketing intern… you name it). And I finally pushed my product live a little while ago. It’s called Resumly, and I’d really appreciate some honest feedback from devs here because this community tends to be more grounded and less, you know, hype-driven.
The idea came from helping friends and family rewrite resumes over and over again. The pattern was always the same: people struggle not with writing, but with “translating” their actual experience into the language job descriptions use. Especially when job postings are full of buzzwords or when ATS systems filter based on phrasing. So I tried building something that uses AI to analyze the job posting + the user’s base resume and generate a tailored version for that specific job. The goal isn’t perfection, just saving people the 1–2 hours they spend rewriting the same thing for each application. I guess the idea is: give people a head start instead of making them start from zero each time.
From a dev angle, the stack is FastAPI + Lambda + MongoDB (which is honestly getting too expensive… might have to move away soon), React on the frontend, Cognito for auth. And then a bunch of AI calls behind the scenes to structure content, extract skills, rewrite sections, etc. Getting the resume output to work nicely in both Word and HTML was harder than I expected. Also, speed was a real problem at first because the flow is basically: scrape → parse → analyze → generate → format. Lots of moving parts.
The hardest part of being a solo founder has been context switching. One hour I’m debugging a FastAPI route, next hour I’m worrying about how to phrase a button label, then fixing a CSS bug, then figuring out SEO (which I have a new respect for now), then answering a customer email. It’s been fun but also pretty exhausting. There are days where small bugs take way too long because I’m operating on 4 hours of sleep. But overall I really enjoyed building it and I’m trying to make it better slowly.
I’m mainly posting this because I’d genuinely like feedback from devs. Does the idea sound useful or kind of meh? Are there any technical red flags you see immediately? Anything you wish someone told you earlier if you’ve built a SaaS solo? Also if you try it and something feels confusing or doesn’t make sense, please tell me. I’m trying not to make product decisions in a bubble, and I know I have blind spots. Even small suggestions go a long way.
Anyway, thanks for reading. Didn’t mean to write this long but once I started typing it just kinda kept going. Happy to answer anything about the build, costs, stack, whatever. And if anyone else here is building something solo, would love to hear how you’re dealing with the ups and downs too.
The project is called Resumly.ai
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