INDIE SAAS STORIES
How a Side Project Built on Weekends Became a $3K/Month SaaS Business
Anyway Team
· 7 min read ·
Meet Riley Tomasek
Riley Tomasek is a software engineer and entrepreneur based in Canada. Before going all-in on Standard Resume, he worked as a software engineer at companies including Dropbox, and was a co-founder at Flight Labs (later acquired by Figma).
Today, he's best known as the founder of Standard Resume — a web app that helps people create beautiful, professional resumes in minutes. The product has helped over 100,000 people build their resumes, and generates approximately $3,000 per month in recurring revenue.
The Origin Story: Solving His Own Problem
Like many successful indie hacker products, Standard Resume started as a personal solution.
Five years ago, Riley was job hunting and wanted a good-looking resume. He tried existing tools but wasn't satisfied with any of them. So he did what any developer would do — he built his own.
The first version was incredibly simple: a static website that could be printed as a PDF. No customization options, just one resume template. His friends Sari and Sinan Maani (who are now co-founders) handled the design.
The first version was very simple. It was for personal use, with no customization and only one resume template. Product-focused with a simple tech stack so we could build fast.
They spent about two months of evenings and weekends building the first version. Then they decided to make a simple editor that could generate resume websites, and launched it.
The Product Hunt Launch That Changed Everything
A few weeks later, in May 2015, Riley woke up to notifications — Standard Resume had been submitted to Product Hunt by Kevin William David.
It went on to become the #1 Product of the Day and gained thousands of new users. The first launch drove about 12,000 views, settling into a steady 1,500 visits per week.
The launch was a huge success — but instead of doubling down, Riley made a different choice. He started a job at Dropbox and only touched the product to pay the bills.
For two full years, Standard Resume sat there — growing slowly through word of mouth, but with no active development.
Turning a Side Project Into a Business
In June 2017 — two years after the initial launch — they decided to add paid subscriptions for the most requested features. They built the features, set up Stripe billing, and kept running it as a side project.
The pricing was simple: $5/month or $20/year.
The revenue grew slowly but steadily:
2017: MRR grew to $440 in the first year
2019: MRR reached $1,000
2020: MRR hit $2,700
Then in May 2020, Riley made a big decision: he wanted to build a profitable, sustainable company. He was tired of the baggage that came with venture-backed startups. Standard Resume was growing steadily and seemed like the perfect opportunity.
He went full-time on the product.
How They Grew With Almost No Marketing
Standard Resume's growth is remarkable because it happened with virtually zero marketing spend. Here's what drove it:
1. Two Product Hunt Launches
The first launch in 2015 got them their initial users. A second Product Hunt launch drove another 10,000 views and pushed weekly traffic to around 4,000 visits.
2. Product Uniqueness
Standard Resume was (and still is) the only resume builder that can import your LinkedIn data and turn it into a beautiful resume. That unique feature became their biggest word-of-mouth driver.
3. Word of Mouth
Happy users share their resumes with recruiters, colleagues, and friends. Every resume created is essentially a mini-advertisement for the product.
4. Content Marketing (Just Getting Started)
More recently, they've started exploring content marketing and SEO — creating resume examples and resources. It's still early, but the potential is huge.
The Tech Stack
Riley and his team built Standard Resume with a focus on simplicity and low maintenance:
Backend: Firebase (database, authentication, cloud functions, hosting)
Frontend: React with Next.js
Hosting: Vercel
Payments: Stripe
The biggest technical challenge? PDF generation. They initially used a third-party service, but it couldn't match their design quality. When building the latest version, they built a custom PDF renderer from scratch — a lot of work, but it lets them generate better PDFs than any competitor.
Business Model & Monetization
Standard Resume uses a freemium model:
Free tier: Create and edit resumes, web resume sharing
Paid tier: PDF downloads, advanced customization, view tracking, remove branding
Riley credits Stripe for making payments easy:
Stripe is amazing. I recommend it to everyone just starting out. Setup was fast, and we haven't had any issues in three years of using it. Being able to change prices quickly has been crucial for growing our MRR.
A significant portion of their MRR growth came from price experiments — they were able to increase revenue just by adjusting pricing, without changing the product at all.
The Biggest Challenge: Churn
If you ask Riley what he'd do differently, the answer is clear: churn.
Most people only need a resume for a few months every few years. That means high churn is built into the product. They knew this from the start, but it turned out to be a bigger problem than they expected.
High churn makes it hard to increase customer lifetime value (LTV), which means you can't spend much on customer acquisition. Many marketing channels cost more per customer than you'll ever earn back from them.
If I could start over, I'd spend more time thinking about how to reduce churn. It's much harder to change your business model or product five years later.
Advice for Aspiring Indie Hackers
Riley's advice is simple but powerful:
Build something people actually need, and charge for it.
It sounds obvious, but it's harder than it sounds. Most people will tell you what they think you want to hear, not the truth. The best way to validate an idea is to get people to pay you — that's a stronger signal than anything else, including sign-ups or usage metrics.
He also emphasizes the importance of analytics and user feedback channels early on. They help you stay honest, measure the impact of every change, and prioritize what actually matters.
Standard Resume started as a solution to Riley's own problem. If you're not lucky enough to be solving your own problem, validate everything as fast as possible. And the fastest validation is getting someone to open their wallet.
The Cross-Border Payment Opportunity
Here's something that doesn't get talked about enough in the indie hacker community: getting paid from international customers can be surprisingly complex.
Standard Resume serves a global audience — job seekers from all over the world use it to apply for positions internationally. When you're building a product for overseas customers, you quickly run into payment challenges:
High fees eating into your margins
Currency conversion headaches
Slow settlement times that hurt cash flow
Limited payment methods causing checkout abandonment
Tax compliance across different countries
This is exactly where Anyway comes in. Anyway is a Merchant of Record for indie developers and AI SaaS founders who want to sell globally without setting up their own payment, tax, and compliance infrastructure. With Anyway, you can:
Accept payments from customers worldwide
Start selling without setting up your own company first
Let the Merchant of Record handle sales tax and VAT
Reduce the operational burden of payment compliance
Keep more time focused on building your product
For solo founders building tools for international audiences — like Standard Resume — a Merchant of Record is not just a “nice to have.” It can reduce the tax and compliance burden and give founders more time to build the product.
Key Takeaways
Start with your own problem. Standard Resume started because Riley needed a better resume himself.
Launch early, even if it's simple. The first version had one template and no customization — but it launched.
Product Hunt still works. Two launches drove the majority of their early growth.
Unique features drive word of mouth. Being the only tool that imports from LinkedIn was a huge advantage.
Price experiments matter. You can grow revenue significantly just by adjusting pricing.
Think about churn early. If your product has naturally high churn, address it sooner rather than later.
Global audience = global payment needs. If you're serving customers worldwide, make sure your payment infrastructure can handle it.
Want to learn how Anyway can act as Merchant of Record for your SaaS business?