I Bought This Domain a Decade Ago. Here’s What I Finally Built.

It Started with a Domain Name and a Decade of “Someday”

I bought ryanrutz.com over a decade ago. It sat there, year after year, quietly renewing while I was busy doing everything else: raising three kids, coaching hockey, building a career across medical devices, SaaS, health and wellness, and enterprise marketing. Every year I’d think about it. Every year something else took priority.

Then, in early 2025, things shifted. After 15+ years of climbing from coordinator to director-level roles at companies like Microsoft, Boston Scientific, Life Time, and BioIntelliSense, I found myself in transition. Open to what’s next. And I realized: if I was going to put myself out there, I wasn’t going to do it with a PDF resume and a LinkedIn profile that looks like everyone else’s.

I was going to build something.

What I Built (and Why It’s Different)

This isn’t a template. It’s not a WordPress theme I downloaded and filled in. Every line of code, every design decision, every interaction on this site was intentional. I built it from the ground up using a custom WordPress theme, vanilla JavaScript, SCSS architecture, and a Supabase backend, with AI assisting the development process through Claude by Anthropic.

Here’s what’s under the hood:

An Interactive Career Timeline — The experience page isn’t a list of bullet points. It’s a scroll-driven timeline with GSAP animations, industry category dividers, metric count-ups, and video walkthroughs for each role. You can see the arc of a career that spans medical devices, SaaS, health and fitness, e-commerce, agency work, and everything in between.

A Searchable Skills Library — 135+ skills across 11 categories, from Salesforce architecture and demand generation to AI engineering and web development. Filterable, searchable, and rendered server-side for SEO. Each skill has context: not just that I know it, but how I’ve applied it.

The Curated Profile Builder — This is the centerpiece. Visitors can build a custom version of my professional profile, tailored to a specific job opportunity, and share it with their network. It’s a 6-step wizard that lets you select which roles, skills, and education to highlight, add a personal note, and generate a shareable link.

AI-Powered Auto-Assembly — Paste a job posting URL into the wizard, and AI analyzes the job description against my actual career data. It selects the most relevant experience, skills, and education, writes a tailored message, and assembles the profile in seconds. Nothing is fabricated. Every data point comes from my verified career history. AI simply picks the right pieces for the opportunity.

A Full Engagement Dashboard — Every curated profile comes with analytics. Creators can see how many people viewed their profile, how it was shared, which videos were watched, device breakdown, scroll depth, time on page, and even a list of email recipients. There’s a line chart showing views over time, engagement tiers that escalate from “Awaiting First View” to “On Fire,” and a video engagement section that tracks individual role walkthrough videos.

The Profile System — Users can create up to three draft profiles simultaneously, manage multiple completed profiles from a sortable dashboard table, toggle between simple mode (no navigation or contact info) and full mode, and track the assembly method: auto-assembled by AI, auto-assembled then manually modified, or manually built step by step.

Agent Rutzy — My AI assistant lives on every page. Named after my childhood nickname, Rutzy answers questions about my career, skills, and background in real time. He’s contextually aware of which page you’re on, which step of the wizard you’re in, and adapts his responses accordingly. He can capture leads, explain the auto-assemble feature, and point visitors in the right direction.

The Candidate Amplification Center

I think of this whole system as a Candidate Amplification Center. The idea is simple: instead of sending the same resume to every opportunity and hoping it resonates, I give people the tools to build something specific. An HR professional looking at me for a marketing ops director role sees different highlights than a startup founder exploring my AI engineering background.

The platform tracks everything. Real-time metrics on the homepage show total profiles created, views, shares, and saves. Every job posting URL that gets analyzed is stored. Every profile view is logged with device type, source channel, scroll depth, and time on page. IP addresses are captured server-side for geographic mapping. It’s the kind of visibility most candidates never have into how their materials perform.

The Technical Build

For those who care about how things are built, here’s the stack:

• WordPress with a custom theme built on the Underscores (_s) starter
• Custom SCSS architecture — variables, components, layout, pages. No Bootstrap, no framework bloat
• Vanilla JavaScript — no React, no Vue. Every interaction is hand-written
• Supabase for the database layer — curated profiles, engagement events, job postings, contact submissions
• Claude API (Anthropic) powering Agent Rutzy and the profile auto-assembly engine
• Postmark for transactional emails — profile shares, tour invitations, internal notifications, lead capture
• GSAP + ScrollTrigger for the experience page timeline animations
• Lottie for the profile viewer interstitial animation (exported from After Effects)
• Server-side tracking with IP capture, rate limiting, and input sanitization
• Row Level Security on all Supabase tables
• Cookie consent and privacy-first design throughout

The site was built with AI assistance, primarily through Claude Code by Anthropic. I want to be transparent about that. AI didn’t replace the thinking, the architecture decisions, or the product vision. It accelerated the execution. The ideas, the user flows, the design language, and the strategic intent behind every feature came from nearly two decades of working at the intersection of marketing, technology, and creative problem-solving.

Why I’m Sharing This

I’m currently looking for my next opportunity. I’m based in Minneapolis, open to remote, and I bring a rare combination: I can build the strategy, design the campaign, write the code, analyze the data, and present the results to the board. I’ve done it at startups and at Fortune 500 companies. I’ve managed Salesforce instances, built demand generation engines, launched AI-powered tools, and led cross-functional teams.

But what I think makes me different isn’t the breadth of skills. It’s the fact that when I saw an opportunity to stand out as a candidate, I didn’t just update my LinkedIn. I built a platform. From scratch. In a few weeks. And I’m sharing the entire process openly because I believe the best way to demonstrate what you can do is to actually do it.

How You Can Help

If you’ve read this far, here’s what I’d ask:

If you have a role in mind — use the Curate & Share tool to build a profile tailored to that opportunity. Paste the job posting URL, let AI assemble the profile, and share it with the hiring team. It takes less than two minutes.

If you don’t have a specific role — share this site with someone in your network who might. The “Help Ryan Get Noticed” option in the wizard is designed exactly for this. No job required, no commitment. Just amplification.

If you’re just curious — take the guided tour on the homepage. It walks through everything in about two minutes. Or open Agent Rutzy in the bottom right corner and ask him anything.

I built this because I believe the job search doesn’t have to be a black box. Candidates deserve visibility into how their materials perform, and hiring teams deserve better tools for evaluating fit. This is my attempt at both.

Thanks for reading. And if you know someone who should see this, I’d be grateful if you passed it along.

Ryan Rutz — Minneapolis, MN
ryan@ryanrutz.com | (612) 568-8583
linkedin.com/in/ryanrutz