CV Glow — a SaaS product shipped like a fast marketing site
Design and development of CV Glow, a resume-builder SaaS. Next.js + Supabase + Dodo Payments. Five weeks from first mockup to live with paid subscriptions.
Context
CV Glow is a SaaS product launched by a solo founder: generate editorial-quality resumes from a light editor, without the heaviness of existing tools. The founder had a clear vision and positioning. What he lacked was a team to take it from Figma to a live, paying product.
The problem
Even a simple SaaS needs more than a brochure site:
- A responsive web editor with real-time preview
- Reliable user authentication
- Subscription payments
- High-quality PDF export
- A marketing site that converts first visits
And all of it within five weeks, before the founder's personal runway ended.
Our approach
Architecture
- Next.js 14 App Router for both marketing site and application (single codebase)
- Supabase for auth + database (Postgres + RLS for multi-tenant safety)
- Dodo Payments for subscriptions (cheaper than Stripe at low volume, simpler to integrate for this case)
- Server-side PDF generation via a Next.js API route + Puppeteer
- Vercel for hosting, with PR-level previews
Design
Quiet art direction, fast to scan, no gratuitous aesthetic flexing. The editor is the experience — it needed to be faster and more readable than the competition (a market choking on overloaded UI).
Deliberate choice: no paid templates, no marketplace, no "themes." One layout, but excellent, plus a tonal customization system (accent color, typeface).
Marketing site
The marketing site shares its codebase and design system with the app. Homepage, pricing, FAQ, blog (empty at launch). The key pages (home, pricing) are built like landing pages — instant load, message that fits in two scrolls, one CTA. On the SEO side: clean product markup so Google knows this is a SaaS tool, not a blog or a local service, and share-card metadata written by hand so the first link dropped on LinkedIn looks the part.
Results
- Shipped in five weeks: design, application, payments, marketing site
- First signups within 48 hours post-launch
- Conversion rate marketing → free trial: 6.4% in the first month (decent for a new product with no audience)
- Monthly hosting: ~$28 across the first few hundred users
Takeaway
The right split for a MVP SaaS shipped fast: one codebase for marketing and product, Supabase to skip backend boilerplate, Dodo Payments to skip subscription logic. What's left to write is the product itself — which is where the time should go.