No Boundaries - Michael Townsend
Five months ago, Michael Townsend couldn’t have imagined he’d be on stage at the No Boundaries pitch competition—not only pitching his company but also earning a thumbs-up and seed funding for his startup, CraftedCV.io.
Townsend, who is based in Evans, Georgia, works remotely for Microsoft as a principal software engineer and has a master’s degree in computer science, specializing in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Software engineers tend to like to fix things that bug them. Back in January, Townsend was thinking about new ways to use AI. He realized a pain point was resume writing. A stat that blew him away is the fact that for every job, 250 resumes are submitted and 200 of these are immediately rejected, unseen by human eyes, because of Applicant Tracking Systems.
Resume writing companies exist, but “they tell you what's wrong with your resume, and maybe some keywords to use, but they don't just do the work for you,” said Townsend. “And I was annoyed by that, and then realized, ‘Wait, I have the skill set to do something about that.”
That’s how he started CraftedCV.io—which uses the power of AI to write resumes that get past automated Applicant Tracking Systems.
Within an hour, he had a working website. Three weeks later, his product—which rewrites resumes to help a person match their strengths to specific job descriptions—was built, and he posted about it on LinkedIn. “And you know, within a couple weeks, over 100 people were using it,” he said. “I was getting feedback from real people that a week before had been fired from Meta, who were actually running their resumes through my system, then passing it off to a career coach, who would annotate it with all their thoughts. Then they were sending me back the annotated version as feedback for how well I was doing.
“The feedback was really positive, and I was like, it’s actually helping people. Let’s see where this could go.”
That’s where his connections to Augusta’s theClubhou.se—and its Make Startups spin-off, a business incubator—paid off. Townsend had found a mentor and his first coding job thanks to theClubhou.se, a coworking and networking space, and had met cofounder Eric Parker at an event. It had been a few years, but Townsend happened to see a post by Parker announcing the No Boundaries pitch competition, presented by Wells Fargo and created by Make Startups, with support from the Aiken Chamber of Commerce, the South Carolina Research Authority, PD Newsom Private Capital, LLC and others.
The pitch competition was designed to showcase how businesses can thrive on both sides of the Savannah River, awarding prizes of $10,000, $5,000, $3,000 and $2,000 to four winning startups. But before he applied, Townsend reached out to Parker. “I was like, ‘Hey, I'm going to apply, but I don't know what I'm doing. I've never built a business. I've never built a pitch deck. So, he mentioned CofounderOS.”
CofounderOS is a software solution built by Make Startups that helps entrepreneurs understand what it takes to launch and run a successful business—by quantifying entrepreneurial skills, evaluating their business for investors and banks, providing feedback on how founders can improve and even predicting revenue generation. To help him write responses to questions provided by CofounderOS—such as “What is your business strategy?”, “How do you communicate it?”, “What is your go-to-market strategy?”—Townsend turned to AI, uploading screenshots from his website and other information to a project folder in ChatGPT. CofounderOS then gave him feedback, so that Townsend could refine the responses. Not only could he then use that information for his No Boundaries application and his pitch deck, but “it was helping me craft all my business strategy. Now I know what to say when people ask me these questions.”
For the hook of his actual on-stage pitch, he turned to his brother-in-law, who is actively looking for a new job search, to help tell the story of all the raw emotions you feel during a job search.
CraftedCV.io earned third place and a $2,000 prize from No Boundaries, which had nearly 60 applicants, with 10 entrepreneurs from across the Southeast chosen to pitch on stage. That money will go right back into his business. But Townsend said the biggest takeaways are this: “So it helped a couple ways. I built CraftedCV.io in a bubble. Now I know businesspeople see this as a potential, real company. So that was validating. Then, there are local venture capital firms that I knew nothing about. One of them had a fantastic idea to help grow the company, and now there’s someone I’m bringing on board to help me pursue this.”
So, what does No Boundaries mean to him? “I always have a lot of ideas about businesses, but before Wednesday, they always seemed like an intangible dream. They were fun to think about and get excited about and maybe even write some code. No Boundaries was the first time it seemed like this could actually be my life.”
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