Ceev

Today Ceev reached 10,000 registered users! I have been working on it just over 6 months now. I was expecting it to take another week or two, but a Reddit comment on the 24th increased my traffic 50x for a little while, which lead to a large bump in signups.

I haven't had much time over the past month to work on Ceev, but I will be getting back to it soon!

A few weeks ago I made an MVP of a job board and put it up live on Ceev.io. Since then, I realized it'll be a lot of time and work to get enough jobs on there to make it worthwhile. I had a few people post openings, but I don't have the time to reach out to enough people to get more on, so I just decided to take it in another direction.

Instead of jobs posted directly to Ceev, I have integrated ZipRecruiter's search. You can now search for jobs directly on Ceev, and it'll show you results from ZipRecruiter's huge collection of jobs. Check it out at https://ceev.io/jobs/browse.

Eventually I will bring back the ability for people to post jobs directly to Ceev, but first I need to focus on other parts of the product, and also get more users.

The jobs feature is meant to be just something extra. Browse jobs on the same site you're using to create your resume. Maybe you'll be lucky and stumble upon something great.

Also, ZipRecruiter has a decent referral program, so it's also acting as a way to monetize free users, which is always good :)

I spent the past week and a half working some design changes. Mainly I wanted to clean up my CSS, and also make a bunch of improvements for mobile devices.

I was spending too much time on each individual element or section on Ceev - trying to make each element look unique and cool. That ended up adding a ton of CSS, and made it take a lot longer to make everything responsive.

So I decided to clean everything up and simplify the overall design. Everything is now consistent and adapts properly on mobile devices. I spent quite a bit of time on animations and interactions so the mobile site feels more like a native application.

Lastly, I created a new promo video so people can see what Ceev can do without having to use it. You can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeSQxao7Tcs

Today I launched the MVP of a feature I'm excited about. Ceev now has a job board!

It's pretty simple right now (and doesn't have any jobs yet), but I have many features planned that will be great for users and people looking to hire.

Check out the board at ceev.io/jobs/browse or read about my plans for it at https://medium.com/ceev/building-a-job-board-where-the-jobs-find-the-applicants-e0e47d14507

As a web developer, I've always had a website that holds all my information and projects. I would often just send that URL to anyone instead of sending a resume.

For most non-devs, the closest thing to that is a LinkedIn profile. I don't like sharing my LinkedIn. The profile pages are so bloated with all of the other features - so there's not really a focus on the user.

So I added public profile pages to Ceev. Users select a simple custom URL, like ceev.io/@mitch, and they can add whatever they want to it. If users already have a resume on Ceev, they can simply import it into their profile.

Profiles give users a simple one-page website unique to them. There are no ads, no social features, etc. It lets the viewer focus on the user and the content.

The extension was successful, but there were some problems. First, it was only available on Chrome and for people who already had LinkedIn profiles up to date. Second, with the UI being injected on top of LinkedIn, it was more difficult to add features.

So for a month I was working on a web version of Ceev. I launched in on March 15th with a ton of new features. Accounts let people save their resumes to come back and view or edit later. I added a ton of customization options and new themes. But most importantly, it was accessible to everyone. It works on all devices, and it made it possible to create a resume from scratch instead of LinkedIn.

That meant the extension also had to change. I updated it so instead of injecting the UI over LinkedIn, it would save the data scraped from LinkedIn into the browser storage, then open a new tab to Ceev web, which would read that data and populate the resume designer.

At this point it was starting to feel like a real product with potential.

A few years ago I created the website ineedaresu.me. I received a ton of feedback from people all over the world who loved using it. After over a year of working on it, I was in school and just starting a full time job, so I didn't have time for it. I ended up selling it, and regretted it a few months later.

So I wanted a do-over. One of the most requested features was LinkedIn importing, so I decided to start with that. Instead of going through the LinkedIn API, which is pretty limited, I decided to go with a Chrome extension. The original extension would transform your LinkedIn profile into a resume, and inject a UI on top of it so you could customize your resume with colors, themes, and fonts.

I launched that mid-February, and the response was great. So that was the start of Ceev.