Loading page…
A student found a $7M AI resume builder on an indie-startup leaderboard, cloned the idea with one tweak, and had 4,000 users and $2,400 in 37 days.
4,000 users · $240 in revenue from a single $30 TikTok ad · 151,000 organic Instagram views in a month from 9-10 videos
"Get it through your head that originality is dead. A burger restaurant in A&W did not stop McDonald's three decades later coming out with their own burgers and making millions."
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Erik is a student at McGill in Montreal, not a millionaire founder, and says he was in the same position as his viewers a year earlier. His first product was Empor, which he scaled to thousands of downloads and revenue and which won a sustainability grant at McGill. Resumax came from a deliberately unromantic process: he was browsing an indie startup leaderboard, saw an AI resume generator called Rezi that had made $7 million, and decided he could build something better. He copied the idea, added a small tweak to differentiate, and went to market without spending any time validating the category — the $7 million figure was the validation. At the time of recording, 37 days after release, Resumax had 4,000 users and had generated over $2,400. He is direct about why he chose this idea over a more original one: in 2026 an idea by itself holds close to no value because building is fast and cheap, and as a solo developer you only need to capture a small share of a proven market. His one filter on top of 'copy something proven' is that the product should address a pain point he personally experiences and that exists at global scale — job searching, getting in shape, phone addiction. That filter is not aesthetic; he explains later that it is what makes the marketing work.
Erik's first users came from his own phone. He posted nine or ten Instagram videos for Resumax, each recorded in about five minutes, and they produced 151,000 views in a month at zero cost — against 4,000 users at day 37, that works out to a view-to-signup rate near 2.6%.
The quick-reference card — acquisition channels, replication playbook, and risk map — is members-only.
Join the Unicorn Club — $5/moCancel anytime, in one clickPaste into Claude Code / Codex and get a working version of this product end-to-end.
Two production-grade prompts per idea — a full build spec and an SEO growth plan — plus 10 tailored build specs a week. Members only.
Join the Unicorn Club — $5/moCancel anytime, in one clickEvery claim traces back to a listed source — open any of them and check the number yourself. Timestamps jump to the second each figure is said.
Members read the exact words said here
0:21 · hear it in the videoMembers read the exact words said here
8:39 · hear it in the videoThe exact line behind each figure is in the Unicorn Club. Read the quote, then jump to the second it's said. Join the Unicorn Club
Data credibility: Self-reported by the founder in a tutorial video on his own channel. Resumax figures — 4,000 users and over $2,400 in revenue at day 37, 151,000 Instagram views in a month from 9-10 videos, and $240 in revenue from a $30 TikTok ad — are all stated on camera with no dashboards shown. The auto-transcript renders the user count as '$4,000 users' in one place and '4,000 users' in another; we read it as 4,000 users, which is consistent with both mentions. The $7 million figure for the competitor Rezi is a number he read on a third-party indie-startup leaderboard, not something he verified. No pricing, conversion rate, churn, inference cost, or margin data is disclosed anywhere in the video, so the $2,400 cannot be decomposed. The founder promotes his own journey and links a sponsor (Gamma) in the same video.
The firm numbers are aggregates rather than a price list: over $2,400 from 4,000 users by day 37, about $0.60 per registered user and roughly $65 a day. The sharpest single data point is the paid test — $30 behind an already-proven TikTok video returned $240 in revenue on the day of recording.
The loop Erik describes is cheap content first, paid amplification second, and it is the only part of this business that compounds. Organic video is the test bench: nine or ten posts at five minutes each cost nothing, and the few that perform tell him which format the algorithm wants for resume content.
Thirty-seven days in, Resumax has not yet had a long flat stretch, and the shape of the business says where the first one comes from: the videos that do not land. Nine or ten posts produced 151,000 views, which means one or two carried nearly all of it and the rest returned nothing to learn from.
The rest of this breakdown — 10 more sections — is in the Unicorn Club, with every section of all 1,335 ideas: first customers, first dollar, the flywheel, and the silent stretch.
Join the Unicorn Club — $5/moCancel anytime, in one click