2024 Recap, The Good, The Bad and The Learnings

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Metrics
  • Business Performance
  • Web Analytics
  • Geo Info
  • Top Pages
  • SEO
• New Features
• The Good
  • Top Tier Sign Up Rate
  • Featured by ruanyifeng/weekly
  • Featured by Hacker News
  • Finally Got Some Revenue
• The Bad
  • Poor Marketing
  • My Fault on Email Outreach
  • Low Organic Traffic
  • Low Payment Conversion Rate
  • Browser Compatibility Issues
• The Learnings
  • KOL Traffic Will Decline
  • Not All Traffic Are Created Equal
  • 10x Content Get You 100x Traffic
  • Respect Reddit Rules
• 2025 Plan

Introduction

PPResume was launched on Sep 6, 2023, after which I spent some time fixing bugs, and then spent another 2 weeks learning how to make my first product marketing video. At Oct 31, 2023, I wrote an official blog post about the launch.

By the end of 2023, PPResume has 177 users, this number becomes 1725 by the end of 2024. With a math on the letters, the number of new users per month in 2023 is $177/4 = 44.25$, while in 2024, it is $(1725 - 177)/12 = 129$. Over the year, people have created 1402 resumes on PPResume.

logto=> select count(*) from users where created_at <= '2024-01-01 00:00:00.000000+00';
 count
-------
   177
(1 row)
 
logto=> select count(*) from users where created_at < '2025-01-01 00:00:00.000000+00';
 count
-------
  1725
(1 row)
 
api=> select count(*) from resumes where created_at >= '2024-01-01 00:00:00.000000+00' and created_at < '2025-01-01 00:00:00.000000+00' and deleted = false;
 count
-------
  1402
(1 row)
 
api=> select count(distinct owner_id) from resumes where created_at >= '2024-01-01 00:00:00.000000+00' and created_at < '2025-01-01 00:00:00.000000+00' and deleted = false;
 count
-------
  1326
(1 row)

There are a lot of other interesting metrics, along with some learnings for bootstrapping a SaaS product as a one man team, whic is why this post is here.

Metrics

Business Performance

• 1548 new sign up users
• 1402 resumes created
• 1326 users created at least one resume
  • 49 users created 2 resumes
  • 4 users created 3 resumes
  • 4 users created 4 resumes
• sign up rate: $(1725-177)/16600 = 9.3\%$
• revenue:
  • Oct 2024: $12
  • Nov 2024: $30
  • Dec 2024: $0 (heart breaking month…💔)

Web Analytics

In 2024 we got a total of 42.4k unique visitors for 3 sites:

We got several spikes in the number of unique visitors for the main site the blog, that is because we were featured by some top channels, I will talk more about it later.

Geo Info

Our users come from all over the world, the top 10 countries/regions are:

• China
• United States
• Hong Kong
• Singapore
• Japan
• India
• Taiwan
• Canada
• Germany
• United Kingdom

Top Pages

The top 5 pages are:

• landing page: welcome to PPResume
• dashboard: sign in and manage resumes
• gallery: a list of public sample resumes
• pricing: pricing plan
• settings: user settings, billing info, etc.

• $3.2k/15.3k = 20.9\%$ of the visitors signed in and accessed their dashboard.
• $1.1k/15.3k = 7.2\%$ of the visitors checked our pricing plan—please note that the pricing plan was only launched at Sep 29, 2024, so the numbers here should be much higher if you only count the users who signed up after the pricing plan was launched.
• $1.3k/15.3k = 8.5\%$ of the visitors were interested in the gallery showcase—please note that the gallery page was launched around Aug 2024.

SEO

Ahrefs’s metrics are a bit better, the DR has been increased from 0 to 17, with a spike of 25 (the day after when the post on typesetting engine was featured by Hacker News), I guess the result is not too bad.

New Features

I’ve introduced a bunch of new features to PPResume in 2024, here are some of them with the link to the blog post and the estimated working days.

The Good

Top Tier Sign Up Rate

According to WordStream’s benchmark report, the average Sign Up Rate for SaaS websites ranges between 2% to 5%, with top performing sites converting at more than 11%.

— Sign Up Rate

PPResume’s sign up rate is 9.3%, which is pretty good and close to the top tier. I guess this is mostly due to PPResume’s clean, sharp and elegant UI/UX design.

Featured by ruanyifeng/weekly

ruanyifeng/weekly is a top, Chinese tech newsletter, maintained by Ruan Yifeng.

PPResume was featured twice in 2024:

• Weekly Issue 297: the product itself was featured, which brings 1.2k+ visits to the website and 183 new signups in one day.
• Weekly Issue 326, the blog post On Typesetting Engine was featured at Nov 22, 2024, which brings 2.2k visits to the blog site and 329 visits to the main site, however it only brings 13 new signups.

Featured by Hacker News

The blog post On Typesetting Engine was featured by Hacker News on Nov 11, 2024, got 151 points in the end, which brings 9.2k visits the blog site and 725 visits to the main site, however it brings only 8 new signups.

The traffic from Hacker News is insane, however the conversion rate is quite low, I guess there are two reasons here:

1. Most of the Hacker News readers understand tech well and they have the ability to create a beautifully typed resume on their own without the need for a resume builder.
2. The readers of the blog post are more likely to be interested in the technical content about typesetting engines, very few of them have the intent to create resumes.

Finally Got Some Revenue

I’ve launched the pricing plan on Sep 29, 2024, two weeks later, on Oct 15, 2024, I finally received the first payment of $9.

Monthly revenue up to the time of writing:

The Bad

Poor Marketing

First thing first, the marketing performance of PPResume is much worse and more difficult than what I am originally expected when I started working on PPResume.

This is my first time to get my hands dirty and do marketing for a product myself. And to be honest, I know nothing about marketing, so I made the wrong expectation and estimation.

On the Internet you can learn a lot of marketing practices, social networking, cold emails, etc. but almost none of them are low hanging fruit—it either takes money or time.

1. Submitting to directories: except for Product Hunt, other directories bring poor traffic. You hardly get any traffic share, and ranking on Product Hunt itself requires effort and luck.
2. Social networking: it is quite a lengthy process to grow a social account starting with less than 100 followers.
3. Reddit: most high-traffic subreddits have “no self-promotion” rules, posting promotions will likely result in subreddit bans or account suspensions.
4. Blogging/SEO: too slow, and you need to write many posts to slowly see some effects. According to ahrefs data, most pages that rank in the top positions on Google take 2-3 years to get there,
5. Email marketing: cold emails are likely to be flagged as spam, and data compliance requirements are becoming increasingly stringent. Sending bulk promotional emails without user consent is likely to be non-compliant with regulations such as GDPR. Meanwhile, building an email list to get user consent is a full-time job in itself.
6. KOL: some require payment, and KOL traffic would decline to almost zero after a month or two.

If you ask me for a recommendation on how to improve the marketing performance, my answer is: be prepared, be patient!

My Fault on Email Outreach

Many said that email outreach is a good way to get traffic, but it is not as easy as it looks. On Oct 2024, I started sending cold emails to people who give Github stars to open source resume builders (such as resumake.io, ReactiveResume) hoping that they could give PPResume a try.

I sent about 200 emails in 3 or 4 days and suddenly got a complaint from a guy saying I’m spamming people:

Hi,

Spamming people because they make Github stars is against the Github terms of service. Please remove me from your list and set technological measures in place to ensure I am not added to your list in the future.

Be well,

To be honest, I also got some emails from people based on my Github profile, which I don’t mind too much, so I think this should be OK. Then I checked the Github ToS and found out that it is against the rules to send promotional emails to people based on their Github profile (another Hacker News discussion).

I immediately stopped the cold email outreach, and then replied and apologized for the mistake:

Hello,

First, I am really sorry for that!

I didn’t mean to spam people, but yes, I did make a mistake. Occasionally, I also receive some emails from people based on my Github profile. Some of the emails are fine while others are irrelevant and I just ignore that, so I think it may be fine.

You mentioned that this kind of emails is against Github ToS, then I’ve spent a hour learning the lession:

• https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-policies/Github-acceptable-use-policies#7-information-usage-restrictions
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30900237

Yes you are right, absolutely. And to be honest, I’ve sent around 150+ emails already. I would stop the whole marketing initiative immediately.

This won’t happen again, I promise.

Regards, Hanyu

With today’s increasingly stringent compliance requirements, it is very risky to send cold emails to people in bulk without their consent. How to get user consent? Emmm, this is a full-time job by itself, you need to provide some value to them, no wonder top tiers newsletters is a valuable asset.

Low Organic Traffic

Like many other webmasters, I use Google Search Console to track the organic traffic performance. Over the whole year PPResume only got only 391 clicks, with 12.5k impressions, which is pretty low and bad performance.

High performing websites can get thousands of organic clicks from Google search, This is the ultimate goal of PPResume and I will make it happen one day.

Low Payment Conversion Rate

As mentioned above, I launched the pricing plan on Sep 29, 2024 and got the first payment on Oct 15, 2024. Over Oct, Nov and Dec, I only got 6 payments, which is much less than what I expected.

There may be some possible reasons:

1. The product is still not good enough.
2. Users who signed up prior to the pricing plan do not need to update their resumes yet, so they do not need to pay.
3. The price plan is a bit high for the current market (probably not, as most competitors charge $10-20/month for subscription).

This is of course a bit disappointing for me. Meanwhile, it is a challenging task to better monetize the product in 2025, otherwise the product would die, no wonder.

Browser Compatibility Issues

At the beginning of 2024, I spent some time optimized the auth flow and introduced google sign in, which results to a boost in the sign up rate. Everything was going well until I got some bug reports from users mentioning that they could not sign in to their account. After digging into the issue, I found out that this only happens with Safari 17+ browsers.

This issue still exists at the time of writing, I am sorry for the inconvenience, I will fix it this year.

The Learnings

KOL Traffic Will Decline

KOL traffic is very juicy, but it will decline to zero after a month or two.

For example, PPResume was featured in ruanyifeng/weekly 297 on April 19, 2024, which brought 1.2k+ visits to the main site and roughly 183 new signups in one day. However, after a month or two, the traffic declined to almost zero.

The blog post On Typesetting Engines was featured again by ruanyifeng/weekly 326 on Nov 22, 2024, which brought 2.2k visits to the blog site and 329 visits to the main site, however it only brought 13 new signups, again, the traffic declined to zero after a month or two.

That being said, being featured by KOLs is still a good way to get traffic, however you should lower your expectations on the traffic, don’t expect it to bring you traffic constantly for a long time. You have to work hard to keep the traffic coming.

Not All Traffic Are Created Equal

Different traffic sources have different quality and lead to completely different conversion rates, because the traffic comes with different user intent. I only realized this fact after being featured by Hacker News—the traffic is insane, but the sign up rate is extremely low.

As you can see, the conversion rate from different traffic sources can be 10x–100x times different. Why is that? Because users who come from different traffic sources have different intent.

For example, users coming from Hacker News are more likely to be interested in the technical content—the typesetting engines, while users coming from ruanyifeng/weekly are more likely to be interested in the product itself—like how to create a beautifully typed resume. Second, most Hacker News readers have some technical background and they are more likely to have the ability to create a beautifully typed resume on their own without the need for a resume builder.

In summary, user intent matters more than traffic.

10x Content Get You 100x Traffic

Even though the traffic from Hacker News did not lead to an expected number of signups, it still helps a lot for product awareness and promotion.

Once you get featured by Hacker News, besides insane amount of traffic, you will also get some additional benefits:

1. More backlinks to your site, which helps a lot for SEO.
2. More visitors to your site, which can help you get more signups—depends on the user insent, as mentioned.
3. More brand mentions, improve your brand awareness and authority.

In my case, a dofollow link from Hacker News increased PPResume DR from 11 to 24 in one day, which is insane and blows my mind.

In SEO practices, 10x content refers to the content that is 10x better than the average content on the Internet. It is a hardcore practice, not easy to do, requires a lot of time and effort, however this effort makes the job done—in my case, it took me 3 weeks to write the post On Typesetting Engine—wait, 3 weeks for a post? You got to kidding me! Yes, I am not kidding, it is a hard investment but the result is far beyond my expectations. Take ahrefs’s DR as the judgement:

1. Jan to Oct: DR increased from 0 to 8.
2. the post went a bit viral on reddit on Nov 1: DR increased from 8 to 12 then down to 11.
3. post featured by Hacker News on Nov 11, 2024: DR increased from 11 to 24 in one day!

Imagine the ROI for yourself.

Respect Reddit Rules

Reddit is a pretty good place to get traffic, but it is also a place with strict rules. There is a site-wide 9:1 rule, which means that for every 1 self-promotional post you make, you should have 9 posts/comments that contribute to the community in some other way. This rule exists mostly mainly to prevent subreddits from becoming spam-filled advertising channels.

Most subreddits enforce strict “no self-promotion” or “9:1” rules. Breaking these rules can result in:

• Post removal
• Temporary or permanent subreddit bans
• Account suspension from Reddit entirely
• Negative community reception and downvotes
• Being marked as a spammer

I was permanently banned from r/typography permanently for violating the “no self-promotion” rule in my first post to r/typography, and there is no way to recover from that.

Many KOLs say that you can promote your content on Reddit, but few remind that reddit is a place with strict rules, and you should respect them, and only promote your content if it really adds value to the discussion, otherwise you will be banned sooner or later.

Here are some of the subreddits I’m interested in, you can see that almost 50% of them forbid self promotion. Be cautious!

2025 Plan

PPResume is a one-man product and for now it is far from being perfect and what I expect. I’ve created a public roadmap to track the progress for future development.

In 2025, I will work on the following features:

• feat: pdf customization: section reordering
• feat: pdf customization: section alias
• feat: import resume data from linkedin
• feat: create dedicated route for creating new resumes
• feat: allow users to publish their resumes to public
• feat: generate thumbnails for resumes list page
• feat: add an interactive playground
• feat: generate thumbnails for resumes list page
• feat: GDPR compliance #74

Hopefully I can make the project self-sustaining and bring more value to the users. Let’s see how far I can push it to.