🏷️Product: A LaTeX based resume builder that helps people create beautifully typeset resumes in minutes.
💸Investment: N/A
📊Business model: SaaS.
🛠️Tech stack: Mantine, Payload CMS, Logto.
🌐Website: https://ppresume.com
🗨️Social pages: 🔗@PPResumeX
Hello! Can you tell us a bit about your background and what led you to develop PPResume?
Hello, this is Hanyu, I am a full stack engineer with 10+ years of experience, working on many different types of projects like data visualization, cloud platform, mobiles, etc.
Why I started PPResume:
Years ago, my friends asked me to help them with their resumes, since I am good with typesetting, especially LaTeX, I was happy to help. I have helped about a dozen people typeset their resumes in LaTeX, and most of them are quite satisfied with the high-quality, beautifully typed resumes.
To my surprise, some of them still come back to me after several years and ask me to help them update their resumes again when they are looking for a new opportunity.
In 2016, I opened an e-commerce shop to sell service for typesetting resumes in LaTeX. I got a few customers, made some money, and realized that if you could offer people high-quality, beautifully typed resumes, there could be a market for it.
How did you validate PPResume’s concept, and what market gap were you aiming to fill in LaTeX resume builders?
I opened an e-commerce shop before automating the product to be a SaaS. I got maybe like tens of orders with the e-commerce shop and one of the customers continues to buy my consulting service even my e-commerce shop has been closed for years.
The gap here is, there’re tons of resume builders however most of the them produce ugly looked resumes. Nearly no LaTeX resume builder on the market produce top tier, beautifully typeset resumes.
Also when you check the keyword “LaTeX resume builder“, “LaTeX resume template“, you will find that these keyword has a moderate difficulty and a not small search volume. So it signals to me that it may worth to create a SaaS for this.
Can you describe the typical user journey on PPResume? What have you optimized for ease of use?
User would first get on board on the landing page, within the landing page he will see a live, beautifully typeset resumes, in real PDF, when he scroll a bit down.
Once the customer is interested, he/she may continue to check the gallery page where it provides more samples/showcases, once he/she want to give a try, he/she could sign in with plain email + password/OTP or google account.
Once the customer sign in, he/she can create resumes, the product support multi languages.
The product also provide a powerful and intuitive dashboard, live demo:
What challenges have you faced promoting a LaTeX-based solution over drag-and-drop editors, and how have you positioned PPResume?
Nope. As far as I can tell, PPResume is the most advanced player on the market regarding to the editor part. There’s another open source one, however this project seems not maintained for quite a while.
What makes a LaTeX-based resume stand out to employers, and why should job seekers use PPResume?
Most recruiters/employers are quite busy when reviewing resumes. A beautifully typeset resumes can help job seekers make a strong first impression.
Of course a beautifully typeset resume cannot guarantee an offer – the real qualifications, skill set, visa status and job market, all combined, will lead to an offer grant. But a beautifully typeset resumes do help a lot for job seekers to success for the initial round.
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