Resume builder for federal job applications

The idea

Federal resumes are a different document wearing the same name: 3-5 pages, hours per week on every job, supervisor contacts, salary history, and duty descriptions that mirror the announcement’s specialized-experience language or get screened out by an HR specialist who never reaches the hiring manager. Normal builders like Rezi actively hurt here — they optimize for one-page brevity, which is precisely what federal HR rejects. Rezi’s $259k MRR proves people pay software to get past a gatekeeper; the federal gatekeeper just has a different rulebook nobody encodes.

The wedge is the announcement parser: pull the actual evaluation keywords from a USAJobs posting and show a coverage checklist, so the product is not a template but a compliance check. Search demand is durable and specific — people type federal resume format and hours per week resume — and horizontal builders do not bid on it seriously.

Who pays

Federal applicants: transitioning military, laid-off contractors, and private-sector workers chasing government stability. They pay $39 one-off per resume or $19/mo while actively applying — a search means 10-30 applications, so the subscription version wins for serious hunters. Distribution is SEO on federal-resume terms, plus veteran-transition communities and federal-jobs subreddits where the format question is asked daily.

MVP scope

• USAJobs announcement parsing with extracted keywords and requirements
• Guided intake enforcing hours per week, dates, supervisors, and salary
• Claude-drafted duty bullets with a keyword coverage checklist
• 3-5 page PDF export plus USAJobs paste-ready text
• Stripe checkout for one-time and subscription plans
• Skip for v1: KSA essay writing, cover letters, application tracking, SES resumes, mobile app

Build FedFormat, a federal resume builder web app.

Core flow: a user pastes a USAJobs announcement URL or its text. The app
parses the announcement with the Claude API to extract series, GS grade,
specialized-experience requirements, and evaluation keywords. A guided
intake then walks the user through each job in their history, forcing the
fields federal HR requires that normal resumes omit: hours per week,
exact month/year start and end dates, supervisor name and phone with a
may-contact flag, and salary. For each role, Claude drafts duty bullets
in federal style — first person, spelled-out accomplishments, keyword
coverage mapped against the announcement — and shows a coverage checklist
of specialized-experience phrases still unaddressed. Output is a 3-5 page
PDF via react-pdf in the plain chronological format HR specialists expect,
plus a paste-ready text version for the USAJobs resume builder.

Stack: Next.js App Router with TypeScript, Claude API for parsing and
drafting, Stripe for payments, react-pdf for PDF generation.

Pages: landing page targeting federal resume format searches, announcement
import, guided intake wizard, editor with keyword coverage panel, export,
account.

Non-obvious details: never let generation shorten the resume — federal HR
penalizes brevity, so enforce a minimum detail depth per role; store one
master resume and generate per-announcement variants from it.

Pricing: $39 one-time per finished resume, or $19/mo unlimited variants
during an active search.