Founder's Letter

I spent most of last week using resume tailoring products and was disheartened by most of what I saw. Nearly all of them made tall promises about ATS optimization and how their system was better at beating the bots. Most of them were downright awful. One in particular couldn't even get basic parsing right despite their huge marketing push. I have a hard time believing that employers are still using the simplistic tools that these resume builders were designed to get around. Even if they are, I don't want to participate in this arms race and it isn't the right problem to solve.

Autobiographer started life as a tool I built for myself and opened up to a handful of people who saw value. My PM self immediately began worrying about problems of scale and looking for ways to monetize it. As I did so, my focus started to shift from building something useful to building something marketable and my priorities started to change. Playing with the other resume builders and engaging with early users and prospects helped me realize I had lost the plot. The goal was to help people, not prey on their anxiety.

The worst of AI-fueled job displacement is yet to come and our focus should be on building tools that facilitate greater clarity and that provide guided paths to developing skills that help humans land the opportunities and the lives that we want. AI is a much better sounding board and thought partner than it is a substitute, despite our current obsession with slashing human headcounts and doing all the things with AI. Perhaps the profit motive is the problem.

So I've made the (overdue) decision to make Autobiographer permanently free to use. Limits on usage will still exist to avoid abuse, but we don't sell credits, and we don't want your money. If you hit your monthly cap, you can earn community credits by spreading the word and by providing feedback, so we can make the tool better for everyone. The money I was planning to spend on marketing is going to be spent instead on fueling the flywheel above and on delivering a high quality experience to as many users as the tool is able to attract.

At some point we may hit a scale I cannot sustain. I'll be glad to have that problem, since that will be evidence that the tool is genuinely useful. That's when this project will turn into a 501(c) (hopefully) funded by the AI companies that helped birth it (wouldn't it be nice if the displacers could help the displacees?). I've got a plan for that outcome, but I'm not thinking too hard about it right now.

We're launching tomorrow on MLK day, four days later than we had planned. Took a bit longer since we had to strip out all of the monetization code, replace it with the community credits, and rewrite our metering system. It was worth it!

Cheers,
Kal