Rezi now has over 1,000,000 users—a million job seekers have used Rezi to create a resume. 65% of the users were acquired in the past three months.
Wherever our users come from, one thing is for sure: we, the Rezi team, appreciate them, and will do everything in our power to ensure they have the resources to succeed in the job market.
Here is a graph of Rezi’s user growth.
Message from Jacob Jacquet, CEO of Rezi:
The idea of Rezi started in May 2015
I came up with Rezi after posting an ATS-focused resume template on Reddit which others could use. This was years before the idea of best resume practices were popularized and common knowledge. This founding idea became the product philosophy of Rezi - make it impossible for a user to build a resume incorrectly.
In the earliest stages of nearly four years, Rezi Instant was launched in the most lean and minimal way possible. It simply reformatted input into the resume template I shared above—without any authentication, database or other helpful features you can use today.
This is what the MVP looked like when Rezi was launched:
An ever-changing resume software.
In September 2019, after approximately three and a half years of building Rezi in Korea as a foreigner—we outsourced the development and launched Rezi as a SaaS. MVP 2.0. This version of Rezi was nearly identical to the original MVP with the addition of authentication, resume management, and upgraded features (Rezi Pro).
Luc Lemerez, Dev hire #1, joined the team to lead the growth of the software. For the next two or so years, we received user feedback to develop features, such as the following examples:
- The Rezi Score: Measures and analyzes resume quality.
- Content Analysis: Suggests best practices similar to Grammarly.
- AI Keyword Suggestion: Recommends relevant keywords based on the job description.
It would be impossible to overstate how important Luc has been to Rezi—this sentence is dedicated to Luc's impact on the company.
Enter the GPT era - circa December 2020 to Present
OpenAI rolled out GPT-3, the precursor to the innovative ChatGPT, in December of 2020. Notably, Rezi was one of the early adopters of GPT among production software applications.
Despite being a small team of two, it was always surprising to us that our competitors made no attempts to incorporate this API into their software. When a handful eventually did, their execution was often far from impressive. This reaction to the changing market, spurred on by new technology, highlighted which competitors were worth our attention and which ones weren't. It also helped Rezi begin to differentiate ourselves from other options and see increasing network effects of user recommendations.
The headway we made in developing and fine-tuning GPT-3 features over the years prepared us for the arrival of ChatGPT. If you look back at the graph at the beginning of this post, you'll see a change in January of 2023. ChatGPT fundamentally altered the way users tackle writing-related issues. All our work up to this moment positioned Rezi at exactly the right place at the right time.
Here is how the AI Writer works.
A reflection on lessons since user #1
My quick thoughts
- Product philosophy comes before anything else—are you building something useful? Our team was extraordinarily lucky to get the product value exactly correct. From the first day, we had users who loved the product.
- As Paul Graham said, Be Good.
- Building on point 1—Listen to what your users tell you and execute quickly to make them happy.
- Don't make mistakes on corporate governance. The biggest mistake I made was giving too much equity to a non-deserving employee in the early days of the company.
- A proper resume has the power to change the trajectory of someone's career in amazing ways. More than anything, I love hearing of users who have improved their job search results since using Rezi.
- Good design is very difficult (test everything) & consumer trends have an outsized impact on product adoption.
We exist to solve the resume
As we continue on this journey, we constantly remind ourselves of our mission at Rezi: "We exist to solve the resume." And success for us is when the brand Rezi becomes synonymous with resume creation, just as Google is with search. This ideology fuels our determination, guiding us in our innovations and improvements. We delight in providing practical resources for job seekers, and their success fuels our fire. Having come this far is not the end, but rather, it marks the beginning of an even more exciting journey.
The road ahead is filled with infinite possibilities and challenges, but one thing is certain: our commitment to help job seekers succeed has never been stronger. We believe in the power of the resume and the limitless potential it has in shaping the futures of job seekers globally.
With over 1,000,000 users and counting, our drive to exceed expectations, set new benchmarks and redefine the status quo remains stronger than ever. Our unmatched perspicacity, coupled with sheer indefatigability creates optimism as we look forward to the many more millions of stories we will play a part in.
Just as a resume is more than a piece of paper, Rezi is more than a software. With each new user, we come closer to realizing our aspirations.
