After receiving positive feedback on the designs of the resumes I created, I decided to roll up my sleeves and create a resume builder.
First, I researched the market. I was confident I could create a better application than all the free CV services out there, with the added advantage of offering extensive customization options even compared to paid ones. As a result of my research, I decided that the most suitable approach for the project would be HTML to PDF conversion. For this, I turned to the wkhtmltopdf library. For deployment, I used the NGINX and Gunicorn combination.
I completed the project and launched it in early 2017. I had a robot that generated resumes above the standards of that time. However, I failed to gain traction with the product.
I believe the primary reason for this was that the method I initially thought of, for quickly generating CVs, proved challenging for users. You could quickly create variations of CVs by inputting information upfront and then selecting saved details. However, the part where you had to save the information proved to be cumbersome for users.
Another significant reason was that I couldn’t allocate enough resources to marketing. I made the mistake of allocating all my resources to PDF rendering because it consumed more CPU and RAM than usual. I acted with the mindset that “getting faster output for users is more important” and did advertisements by writing ads on forms and sharing them on social media. With a one-year military service interruption, the application remained somewhat barren, with monthly usage fluctuating between 100 to 500 users. Later on, due to the increasing exchange rate and taxation in dollars, server costs became more expensive, leading me to shut down the project and redirect my resources toward my education.
cvzilla is important to me as my first major and comprehensive project in the web world that has stood the test of time. Successfully managing the development and deployment of the application from start to finish boosted my self-confidence, allowed me to take pleasure in my work, and provided me with valuable experiences.
You can browse through cvzilla introduction and tutorial videos by clicking here.
