Partner Story · in conversation with Self. This is a written interview submitted through Submit Your Story. The claims below are the founder's own, presented as they were given to us. No payment was involved.
Javier Martínez, founder and CEO of Self. Photo: courtesy of the founder.
The CV has survived every attempt to replace it, and it deserves to. Inside a formal recruitment system it still works. As a public interface for a professional, it is showing its age.
"It can be awkward on mobile, easy to lose in an inbox and too rigid for projects, media, publications or the context behind a career change," says Javier Martínez, founder and CEO of Self.
The obvious alternative fails in the opposite direction. A general website builder gives a person freedom, and with it a blank canvas and several dozen decisions about layout, typography, hosting and search visibility, none of which the average professional wants to learn in order to explain what they do for a living.
Self sits between the two: give it the career material you already have, get back a responsive personal website in under a minute.
Where the AI actually sits
Martínez is from Spain and his background runs through software engineering, telecommunications, machine learning, computer vision and scientific research. That shows in how precisely he describes the part of the product that does the work.
"AI performs the translation between messy career material and a structured website."
Several models are involved, including ChatGPT 5.6 Sol and Gemini 3.5, alongside document parsing, computer vision, structured schemas and deterministic validation. A model identifies the sections of a document, maps experience, projects, skills and education into structured JSON, then adapts that material onto a responsive page.
The interesting engineering, by his account, is not the generation. It is the accuracy of the mapping.
"The system needs to understand the source material correctly, place information in the right sections and preserve what the user meant. We combine language models with structured schemas, validation and deterministic checks to make that process reliable."
That is a familiar pattern for anyone who has shipped a model into production: the language model handles the ambiguity of the input, and hard-coded rules stop it from getting creative with the output. The user's own history is not a place for the model to improvise.
The extension that fills in the forms
The second half of the product is less visible and, for a job seeker, possibly more useful.
Self ships a browser extension that autofills job applications using the verified professional information already sitting on a user's Self page. The same experience, education and contact details that a person retypes into every application form get filled in seconds.
The economics of that are simple and worth stating plainly, since our readers come here for exactly this kind of arithmetic. A serious job search runs to dozens of applications, each with the same fifteen fields, each taking ten to twenty minutes of retyping. Removing that is not a feature, it is several working days recovered from the least valuable task in the process.
What it costs
The pricing published on Self's own site puts a free tier at one hosted page on a you.self.cv address with a handful of generations a day, Pro at €2.99 a month, and a Team plan at €14.99 a month for managing multiple profiles. Pro adds custom domains, full design control, SEO controls, analytics and a much higher autofill allowance.
Three euros a month is priced below the point where anyone convenes a meeting about it, which for a consumer career tool is the correct place to be.
The traction, stated without decoration
Self has been fully live for about three months. As of August 2026, Martínez reports around 300 users and more than 100 published pages, with growth almost entirely organic at roughly a couple of sign-ups on a typical day.
Notably, he says some of those users arrive through answers from ChatGPT and other AI assistants rather than through conventional search, which is a distribution channel most founders still cannot measure at all.
The company is funded entirely by Martínez himself, with no external investment.
"At this stage, I have chosen to focus on learning from organic users and improving the product around how they actually use it before investing heavily in acquisition. That gives us a direct feedback loop between users and product development."
That is an unusually disciplined position in a category where the standard move is to buy traffic and call the resulting numbers traction. Three hundred users who found you by themselves tell you something true about the product. Thirty thousand bought at two dollars a click tell you about your budget.
Where it started
The trigger was his own CV.
"During a period of uncertainty at work, I rebuilt it and found myself approaching the problem as an engineer. I started wondering why my professional profile had to remain a static document when so much of my work, projects and experience made more sense on the web."
He built himself a website, and the difference was immediate: one link, current, explorable, presenting the work rather than compressing it into a page of bullet points. The larger realisation followed, that AI could make the same thing possible for almost anyone, without the design skills, the code, the hosting or the hours.
What comes next
The direction is from tool toward record. Martínez wants Self to become the practical home of a person's public professional identity: keep the page current, see whether it is actually being read, and reuse the same verified information across applications and other professional workflows. Work continues on the page builder and the autofill, with an eye on how career professionals, schools and teams might manage multiple profiles at once.
He is looking for thoughtful users and partners who care about career visibility and practical uses of AI.
There is a neat symmetry in the bet. The CV was never the point; it was a container for something a person actually is. Self's argument is that once the container stops fitting, it takes a minute and three euros to change it. The product is at self.cv.
---
This is a Partner Story: a written interview with a company building with AI, submitted through Submit Your Story and published free of charge. Statements about the company's product, customers and results are its own. Building something with AI? Tell us about it.
