单人打造轻量化设计工具矩阵，3年累计营收超50万美元

Getting started

I’m Fernando Pessagno, a solo founder from Argentina currently living in Sweden. I run a small group of SaaS products in the design space: aiCarousels.com, ResumeMaker.Online, and GeneratePPT.com, along with PreviewMyProfile.com, a free tool that funnels users to the rest of the ecosystem. Previously, I spent ten years running my own web design studio in Argentina. On paper, things seemed fine. I had clients, income, and a proper career. But I was burned out from boring client work and felt super disconnected from the work I wanted to do. I created ResumeMaker.Online. At first, it was just a silly side project to reconnect with the fun of building and improve my coding skills. In 2018, it even won Product Hunt’s Product of the Week, which showed me that these “silly projects” could become something bigger. But, coming from design, I struggled to believe I could make a living from coding and shipping my own products. After closing the studio, I went to work at tech companies abroad, first at Envato in Mexico, then Clarifai in Estonia, while still “playing startup” on the side. I left that job in Estonia and got a job in Sweden with a huge pay cut to be with my Swedish girlfriend, who had just had two failed ACL surgeries. I moved mainly for her. The company knew this from day one. They promised me a stable job and a real vision for design. Then, in 2023, after a year of good work and positive reviews, they decided design was no longer a priority and fired me the day before my vacation. Pretty shitty move. It left such a bad taste that I said, “Fuck this corporate bullshit.” Instead of using those vacation days to recover or apply for new jobs, I launched the MVP of aiCarousels.com. Shortly after, I relaunched ResumeMaker.Online as a proper SaaS. That's when I went all in. It's been three years, now, and I've generated $500k+ in revenue.

The closest thing to a dream job

I was motivated by a mix of knowing the design pain points well and a deep, lifelong need for autonomy. Since school, I asked teachers if I could do group assignments alone. I'm not sure what that says about me, but I've always liked working solo, fully responsible for the results. I was probably unemployable since first grade. My 9-to-5 jobs benefited me in many ways. They taught me a lot, exposed me to how larger SaaS companies operate, and enabled my relocation to Europe. I do not regret them. But I loved what those jobs gave me, not the actual job itself. I really wanted to own the whole thing: the decisions, the wins, the mistakes, the stress, all of it. That level of ownership feels right to me. But more than anything, I wanted to build something truly mine. Working solo in my quiet corner, relying on myself, is probably my closest thing to a dream job.

Going all in

Even with all that motivation, going all in was the hardest thing I did. So much advice tells you not to quit your job too early, not to be stupid. I get it. I am not telling people to be reckless or ruin their lives. But honestly, thank God I got fired. Knowing myself, I could have dragged that half-in, half-out phase for years. I already had a massive signal back in 2018 when ResumeMaker.Online won Product Hunt’s Product of the Week, and even then, I still did not get it. Or maybe I got it and did not have the guts to trust myself. I do not exactly regret it — maybe I was not ready. But I was definitely blind to what was possible. A lot of people live there for too long. Not because they are lazy, but because fully betting on yourself is scary as hell. So you stay in this safe limbo where you tell yourself you are building, but your best energy still goes to your day job. Once I had the pressure to survive in an expensive country like Sweden, everything changed. I worked differently. I focused differently. The energy was totally different! My products stopped getting the scraps of my time and energy and stopped being treated like a cute little beer-money side project. I NEEDED to make it work. So I’m not going to give fake macho advice like “quit your job and escape the matrix”. But I will say this: Maybe some people should consider quitting their job, especially if they are still young, have some savings, and feel stuck in limbo. Going all in creates a focus and urgency that is very hard to fake. The fucked up part is this path usually takes blind, dumb, youthful optimism, and that is exactly what fades as you get older. I started late, and if life had not pushed me hard, I’m not sure I would have ever done it. Also, I'll say this: If you are not ready to make that jump, then at least try to fabricate pressure. Put a deadline in public. Tell your friends. Make it harder to pretend you can always do it later.

Focusing on simplicity

I built the first version of ResumeMaker.Online because my sister needed help with her resume. When I looked at existing tools, most felt bloated and unnecessarily difficult to use. So I built the opposite. My design background and a persistent belief informed this: Most people dislike designing and are not good at it. Even some designers hate design when it comes to boring, practical stuff like resumes, pitch decks, or LinkedIn carousels. I would know, because I’m one of them! This made the market feel so obvious to me. As a solo builder, I believed constrained products offered a better chance: fewer, but better, features. I never wanted to build a bloated monster platform that tries to do it all. You can see this everywhere. Resume builders slowly turn into weird job platforms full of upsells and distractions. Canva cannot be deeply useful for one thing because its interface stretches across a million different use cases. Presentation tools also do this, either by awkwardly forcing AI into legacy products that were never designed for it, or by drifting into website builders or whatever investors think sounds bigger, instead of staying a simple presentation tool. Many design products are massively overbuilt. Most users do not care about the number of features. They are not impressed by a giant settings panel, thinking, "Wow, this has 37 options, amazing." They just want a decent result and to move on with their lives. Knowledge workers do not get paid more, hired more, or get better outcomes because they spent another hour tweaking drop shadow blur or some tiny design setting. That is why I have always been more interested in building sharper products that know exactly what they are, make smart tradeoffs, and help people get good results fast without drowning them in buttons and sliders.

A simple stack

My tech stack is very simple. My latest product, GeneratePPT.com, uses JavaScript and PHP. But I’m not very ideological about the stack. Especially nowadays, the stack matters a lot less. Simpler stacks also work more easily with AI. For AI itself, I’ve been trying Codex this week, but generally I use whichever provider feels best for the job at the time — Claude, OpenAI, or Gemini — which I think most of us do now anyway. Additionally, Outseta handles auth, CRM, and payments. Sure, you can try building all of that yourself, but I’ve never seen the point in wasting months rebuilding infrastructure that already exists and works well. Outseta takes minutes to integrate, saves many headaches, and its team is genuinely awesome. Recently, during a bad-faith domain dispute that I ultimately won, the other party pressured and threatened them, but they still stood by me instead of backing off. I can attest that they support their users like real partners, not like some cold software vendor. That mix of a great product and that level of support is pretty rare to find.

A resilient portfolio

My business model is simple: a 100% bootstrapped portfolio of SaaS design tools for non-technical users. I grew revenue by solving the same pain point from different angles. I never wanted to build one giant, bloated platform. This also makes them easier to market. When a product is simple and has one clear value proposition, people understand it and know if it is for them much more easily. I prefer to build smaller, sharper products that share the same type of user and feed each other. I believe this made the business more resilient. Instead of betting everything on one product, I built a small ecosystem where each product helps the others grow. It's a much calmer way to build as a solo founder.

Pick a lane and stick to it

Sticking to a lane helped me a lot. Almost all my products, including the ones that failed, are different forks of the same thing. Same general design space, same user type, same taste, same core problem to solve. So when one project fails, I am not back to zero. I carry the lessons, useful bits of code, the insights, and the taste into the next thing. It compounds. That is a massive advantage as a solo founder. People hear “multiple products” and imagine total chaos, but it is less chaotic when the products share so much. When I improve one, I usually improve another too. It feels more like building an ecosystem than juggling random, disjointed bets. Building for non-experts also helped. I do not have B2B experience, but B2C has worked very well for me because it forces you to help regular users. A lot of tech people live too deep in their own bubble and forget that most people are not excited about the latest AI agent-driven automation workflow. They just want to stop screaming at the computer and get a good enough result. That has been a good market for me, because it is not a tiny niche. It is the majority of the market! Even if there are big competitors, the market is so huge that there is still plenty of room if you make something that feels simpler and easier.

Quit zombie projects sooner

Get better at quitting zombie projects sooner. I think perseverance is a double-edged sword. It matters (a lot!), but if you apply it blindly, it can destroy you. You only have so many years, so much energy, and so many real attempts left before this game starts eating your money, your relationships, your health, and eventually your confidence. Until one day you wake up thinking, “Maybe this isn't for me,” and quit. Funnily enough, the worst thing that can happen with your product isn't always hitting zero MRR. Zero is painful, but at least it's a clear message: it’s dead. A much worse outcome is ending up with a zombie project that has low but non-zero MRR after a year of nonstop grinding. Real traction has a certain feeling. When something has early traction, it doesn’t feel like you’re dragging a lifeless body uphill, constantly pumping life into it to keep it moving. When something works, it feels alive, like you’re barely pushing. It feels like the product is carrying you, instead of the other way around. If it doesn’t have that feeling, kill it, pack up the lessons, pivot completely, or move on to your next idea.