R
Rezi
👤 Jacob Jacquet (Landed Google and Goldman interviews on a 2.2 GPA - he was living proof his own method worked, and posted it on Reddit.)🌐 site𝕏LinkedIn
A broke grad sold a Word template for $9.69, moved to Seoul, and turned it into a profitable AI resume company.
Will it work? · our read
Eleven years deep. From a $9.69 Word template to $259K a month, at 55% margin. Eleven years of compounding SEO and a Seoul cost base, not a breakout.
01How the money moves
Job seeker searches AI resume builder and lands on Rezi
→
Builds a resume free, then hits the download limit
→
Pays $29/mo or $149 once for lifetime
02The numbers
$259,535 MRREstimateStripe-verified MRR
2026-07
Margin and lifetime value are the founder's own figures from about July 2024. The Stripe total is current. TrustMRR
About $3.1M a year run-rate; $9,664,350 taken on Stripe all-time.
🔒
You have the verdict. Members get the work behind it.
- The CENTS scorecard — where it's strong, where it's soft
- The founder's key move, and the counter-move
- How it could die — the evidence, and how sure we are
- The case against our own call
- A 🚀 launchpad prompt — the case, as a plan for your business
We rate our own confidence — and argue against ourselves. Nobody else in this category does.
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TrustMRR profile — MRR $259,535, all-time $9,664,350, 10763 active subscriptions; page states revenue is verified with a Stripe API key, updated 18 Jul 2026.Starter Story founder interview — Jacob Jacquet in his own words: $215K MRR at the time, 54.97% margin, $101.90 lifetime value, 432,638 monthly visits, 11 staff in Seoul.rezi.ai pricing — live page: Free, Pro $29/mo, Lifetime $149, Enterprise $99/mo per 200 users.rezi.ai about — started May 2015 as a weekend project; office in Seoul, South Korea.Latka — third-party estimate of $3.2M ARR for 2024, listed as bootstrapped; not used as our headline.
Headline figure is STATED, not FILED: $259,535 MRR is pulled from Rezi's own Stripe account through TrustMRR's API connection, so it is first-party and machine-read but not audited or filed with any regulator. We opened that page and confirmed the string. Caveat: it is a live dashboard that updates, so the figure will drift; as of 18 Jul 2026 it read $259,535 MRR against $240,461 for the trailing 30 days — two different measures on the same page, and we used the MRR. We rejected Latka's $3.2M ARR as a headline because it is a third-party estimate and the founder has published his own numbers. Margin (54.97%), lifetime value ($101.90) and traffic (432,638 monthly visits) come from the founder's Starter Story interview, which we date to about July 2024 from his own line that it had been 3,340 days since the May 2015 idea — those three are roughly two years old and the $215K MRR quoted there is now superseded. On 'bootstrapped': Rezi is commonly labelled bootstrapped and is profitable and founder-controlled, but this is not a zero-funding story. The founder says he spent 2015-2018 seeking financing to pay a development agency and credits 'proper management of the cap table' for avoiding excessive dilution, so small early money exists. Aggregators conflict badly here — PitchBook shows about $338K raised, another shows $30.1M over two rounds including a YC seed, which we believe is a mismatched record for a different company. We could not open a primary funding source, so we assert no funding number. Region: rezi.ai/about states the office is Seoul, South Korea, while TrustMRR lists the company as United States; we used the company's own statement. No drama in this case — it is eleven years of execution, one well-timed technology bet, and SEO. We also examined and rejected Focusmate for this slot: its own media kit names Betaworks, Upfront Ventures and other backers, so it is venture-backed despite being tagged 'Bootstrapping' elsewhere. We never score you.