Career Minder Website

Role: Co-founder & Designer

Career Minder’s website has gone through a few iterations since the product’s launch in 2023. The consistent idea was to treat the product as a fully featured Software as a Service (SaaS) offering. However, all those iterations took for granted that people knew they had the problem that the product was built to address.

SaaS > Letter

So, rather than treat the website as another product trying to stack up in a features list competition with anything else people might use, we decided to be more straightforward. We decided to write a letter to the website’s visitors that explained career problems people commonly face, why we built Career Minder to address those problems, and how the product fits into their lives like other be-a-grownup software does.

We still describe the features of the product elsewhere on the site and have begun building a documentation section that describes how to use Career Minder. However, another reason for the change was to bring the people behind the product forward. Career Minder is not a venture backed startup giving product away for free as they burn through cash paying engineers to thrash from one initiative to another. It is built by an independent duo who are working to address problems through deliberate action. This ethos carries through the pricing page as well.

AstroJS

The website is built on AstroJS, a Javascript framework with React-like syntax. However, unlike most heavy Javascript frameworks, it is fast and we deliver it server-side-rendered from Cloudflare. Another benefit of AstroJS is robust support for different content types, like the Markdown and JSON we use. AstroJS is a great choice for customer facing marketing sites because of its speed and content editing flexibility. Career Minder itself, on the other hand, is more heavy duty in handling data and requires a lot of interactivity, so we’ve built that in React.