PPResume

We started to got some orders this week. This is a milestone after 22 months of hard work. We are on the road to our first target: making the business self-sustainable.

Starting next week, we are going to ship more on-demand features, check our roadmap: https://github.com/ppresume/community/issues/67

PPResume just introduced a pricing plan.

Check out blog post: https://blog.ppresume.com/posts/introducing-the-pricing-plan for details.

All users that sign up before Nov 1, 2024 will get a early bird 50% discount for a year.

Preview:

I am super excited that PPResume has made a big step forward to support multiple languages, starting from Chinese language (3 variants, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese HK and Traditional Chinese TW). PPResume was designed from the bottom up to support internationalization and I finally got some time recently to implement this. As far as I know, PPResume should be the only resume builder on the market that supports multi languages while still follows best typesetting practices.

Preview:

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OK, a bit more tech details here. Supporting multi languages is not as easy as translating some English phrases, you have to follow target languages' idioms, conventions, and typesetting best practices when mixing different languages. Here are some nitty gritty details:

1. datetime has different display convention between English and Chinese, for example, Jun 2018 – Present in English will be translated to 2018 年 6 月至今 in Chinese，the position of the year and the month should be reversed, and the en-dash – should be removed.

2. Number styles in English and Chinese resumes can be different, we can apply OldStyle numbers in English, while adopting Lining style numbers for Chinese resumes, just make the glyph style align with host language.

3. Traditional Chinese has at least Hong Kong and Taiwan variants, and one country can have slightly different names in HK and TW Traditional Chinese, better to take care of this.

4. Locations. The address format are different between English and Chinese conventions. In English, the smaller segment, like the address line, town comes first, then follows by city, state and country, while in Chinese, the order is totally reversed.

5. Punctuations. English use comma as the separator, while Chinese has dedicated separator (顿号 、) to separates items in a list (like Keywords list), better to handle this as well.

6. Last but not least, CJK character set is huge and many typefaces are missing glyphs for many CJK characters and we have tested carefully to make the right choice for CJK fonts. Here we choose Noto Sans/Serif as the default font for CJK.

The foundational work has been settled down, it won't be too hard to support more languages, Japanese, French, Spanish, etc. Stay tuned with us!

PPResume now get a standalone window and can be installed as an app on your devices.

With PPResume PWA, we get:

• a standalone app window on your OS, an icon on dock, home screen
• improved performance, all static assets are cached, network latency and bandwidth cost get reduced dramatically
• works better on weak or even offline network conditions

Let's take a quick look:

Live demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoqP0vUMDy4

Blog post here.

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BTW we got 900+ signups, if everything went well, we could hit 1000+ signups with this month.

Next plan:

• CJK support for resumes
• section reordering
• more templates

PPResume got 700+ signups since our last post and now we have 700+ signups.

We got featured by one of the top weekly newsletter from https://ruanyifeng.com (in Chinese), which brought us almost 200 signups in two days, super amazing.

If you are looking for ways to increase your traffic, besides hackernews, reddit, product hunt, you can try to submit your SaaS product to some newsletter, they may accept your proposals and that woudl be a win-win.

Waiting for 1000 signups.

PPResume, the LaTeX-based resume builder that helps people create a beautifully typed resumes in minutes, has recently received over 400 signups.

The product was launched in September 2023, got about 50 registered users in the first week, then it went down to 0 signups daily for quite a while, and recently I have received 100 signups per month for 2 months, so now there are 400+ registered users.

I just want to give you some tips on how to increase the number of signups during my journey.

Integrating social sign in to boost sign up conversion.

Make sure that your product has a smooth and robust auth flow, do not build your own auth as it is quite complicated, but instead use a professional auth solution and try to integrate social sign in (Google, Facebook, to name a few), people hate to type in username/password, and they hate to remember strong password, weak password is not safe, resetting forgotten password is painful.

Before I integrated Google Sign In, 45% of users were using Gmail. Now 85% of new users use Gmail, and 93% of Gmail users sign in directly with their Google account, check this blog post for details.

Get a good looking landing page

Last month I revamped the landing page with a new, clean design and it's being loved by a lot of people and has resulted in a bucket of signups.

Compare the new landing page:

With the old one:

The old landing page was designed on an iMac 5k, which looks bad on normal devices like the macbook pro or various pads.

A good looking landing page gives a good first impression, which is very important to get customers to sign ups.

Introduce a headless CMS to simplify the tedious CRUD coding tasks

Coding CURD for SaaS backend is boring, and many SaaS backends can be simplified and abstracted as a type of content management system, yes the CMS. Traditional CMS systems like WordPress inherently have a front-end design that is most likely not suitable for a general purpose SaaS as SaaS often has some need some unique UI/UX requirements for frontend. Recently, however, there are many headless CMS that only provide a backend and admin dashboard, and you can insert your own frontend with your own design, which is very flexible and time-saving to build a SaaS.

Most importantly, the admin dashboard in any SaaS solution is very helpful for SaaS makers in maintenance, testing and other daily tasks. I assume you do not want to inspect your database to check issues with your backend data, right?

I myself first implemented PPResume with strapi and then migrated to payload. I am glad that I can use a headless CMS instead of developing the CURD backend from scratch, which saves tons of time for me.

Hope these learnings helps.

Regards.

Hello IndieHackers,

Super happy to join this community. Allow me to introduce my side project, PPResume, a LaTeX based resume builder that helps create beautifully typed resumes in minutes.

Here's a preview:

Background

A beautifully typed, pixel perfect resume helps people stand out from the crowd. While there're so many resume builders on the market, most of them put a heavy bet on UI/UX, however, their PDF output is not very good — if not quite bad.

LaTeX provides the state of art typesetting ability and can output extremely high quality PDF, however, it comes with a very steep learning curve.

PPResume tries to give people the power of LaTeX and an intuitive, powerful UI/UX — the best of both worlds.

Sample Resume

A sample resume generated by PPResume (powered by LaTeX under the hood)

The Powerful and Intuitive UI/UX

The dashboard for creating/editing a resume;

The powerful dashboard is very flexible and intuitive, with the following features:

• real time input validation
• rich set of input controls
• structural editing
• customizable layout

I've made a video demo for this as well.

Other links:

• blog
• docs

Being Social

Any one interested in web development, typesetting/typography, can connect with me.

My personal profile:

• https://github.com/xiaohanyu
• https://twitter.com/xiaohanyu1988

Regards!