Building BrainUp: lessons from shipping a free resume builder
What building a free, AI-assisted resume builder for job seekers in India taught us about friction, SEO and using AI where it helps.
BrainUp is our career productivity platform for job seekers, starting with a resume builder at brainup.in. It is free, needs no signup, and lets people build, score and download a resume in the browser. Building it has taught us a lot about what makes a product genuinely useful. Here are the lessons we keep coming back to.
Remove every step that isn't the job
Someone who wants a resume wants a resume, not an account, a trial or a paywall at the download button. Removing signup and download limits did more for BrainUp than any single feature. Every extra step between a person and the thing they came for is a reason to leave.
What you see must be what you get
A resume builder lives or dies on its preview. If the downloaded PDF doesn't match what was on screen, people stop trusting the tool. We treat the live preview and the exported PDF as one feature, not two, and test them together.
Use AI for the hardest part, and only that part
Most people find the same parts of a resume difficult: turning duties into achievements, writing a summary, and knowing which keywords a role expects. That is where BrainUp uses AI, through a bullet point enhancer, summary and skill suggestions, and an ATS score against a job description. Everything else is plain, fast software. And every AI suggestion stays editable, because it is the person's resume, not ours.
AI should shorten the hardest step, not take over the whole task.
Content only helps if search engines can read it
Job seekers search for help constantly: how to write a fresher resume, what a data analyst resume should include, which format to use. Guides and blog posts can meet them there, but only if search engines can read them. An early lesson for us was that content rendered only in the browser wasn't being indexed properly. Moving it to static generation with Next.js, so every page is served as ready-made HTML, fixed that.
Build for the users you actually have
BrainUp's users include students and freshers applying for their first job, experienced professionals and career switchers, with a focus on job seekers in India. That shapes everything from template choices to the examples in our guides. Designing for a real audience beats designing for an imaginary average one.
What carries over to client work
- Friction is a feature decision. Treat every extra step as a cost.
- Trust comes from consistency, like a preview that matches the output.
- AI is strongest when it is narrow, reviewable and clearly useful.
- Technical SEO is part of the product for anything that relies on search.
BrainUp is still evolving, with more capabilities in development. You can try it at brainup.in, and if you are building a product of your own, we would be glad to bring these lessons to it.