Hi Product Hunt! Solo builder from New Zealand 👋

Hi everyone! I’m Carlos, a solo builder currently based in New Zealand.

I’ve been working as a software engineer for several years, mostly on backend systems and integrations. Recently, I started spending more of my spare time building small products of my own.

One of my earlier projects was an IPYNB to PDF converter, which I built after noticing how annoying it could be to quickly turn Jupyter notebooks into clean PDFs without setting up extra tools locally.

Now I’m working on CandidThread, a job search tool.

The idea came partly from my own experience looking for software jobs overseas. I found that applying itself wasn’t always the hardest part — keeping track of different applications, tailoring resumes, preparing interview stories, and remembering what I had told each company quickly became messy.

So I started building something that helps organize that whole process and uses AI where it’s actually useful, rather than just generating another generic resume.

I’m still very early in the journey and learning a lot about building products, distribution, SEO, and finding users.

For other indie makers here: how did you find your first 10–20 real users?

Was it SEO, communities, cold outreach, friends, Product Hunt, or something completely different?

Would love to hear your experience.