It seems to me from your story that you could use some slightly more hard-nosed business sense. I won’t pretend I know what you should do, but I do have a few reactions to your story and situation.
Building out a data science/ML jobs site that is trusted by ML workers is a good idea, and could be really valuable. One downside; it’s such a large and competitive market that you will be competing with well-financed groups. But, it has a lot to recommend it, not least that these workers are extraordinarily valuable to corporations right now.
I get that you want to aim at workers first for cultural reasons.
What I would do, immediately, as in today, would be to reboot your recruiting business and start getting set up with corporations who are hiring ML workers as a recruiter.
The problem you have right now is that you are charging the side of the two-sided ML jobs market that has no money; the workers. You should charge the side that is willing to pay up to seven figures for good ML workers.
Now, how do you keep your culture and values? There are lots of possibilities — you could keep charging the $10, but offer to forward the candidate to companies that match the resumé. You could make a ‘transparency pledge’ to the workers, as well as do revenue sharing with them.
You could build out the site into a trusted sort of glassdoor for ML workers where people (that you have vetted, I’d suggest) can anonymously tell others (and most importantly, you) which companies are good and which are bad.
At any rate, I’d strongly urge you to think about hitching up your economics to the side of the market that can get tens of millions of dollars of value out of the people you’re working so hard to help — keep helping the people you want to; getting them a job is a lot more help than prettying up their resume.
And, congrats on the sale! It feels good when someone wants what you’re selling :)
Right now the resume builder is general purpose for people wanting to work in tech. We went down the path of charging companies for access to qualified candidates and the lesson we learned is that you first need a critical mass (which is bigger than we initially thought) to make it scaleable.
To get enough job seekers looking for a specific job in a specific location with a specific skillset with a specific number of years of experience (companies are very specific with what they're looking for) requires a large number of job seekers on your platform.
We want to start with a resume builder to provide value to these people at the first stage of their job searching process so we can then layer in more services and tools as we grow to that necessary critical mass.
Eventually, we intend for one of those services to be the forwarding to companies when the candidate matches what the company is looking for and vice-versa.
We write meaningful sized checks to recruiting agencies that look for people on LinkedIn and pitch them on taking our jobs.
While this is true if you want to build lots of these niches at once, I'm not sure if it holds for a specific niche. Rather than trying to fill a giant general-purpose funnel, you may find it easier focusing on a tighter niche to begin with.
For example: ML recruiting for data scientists in the Bay Area with 3+ years of experience
You can find them on LinkedIn
- Google Namedropping is annoying like hell and i have seen it plenty of times. You will not feel great if you need to bring that up all the time - When i google for Resumes, resume.io is the first hit with ad and it cost 3$ - When i go to your website, i don't even know that it is a paid product - People really don't care that much about there resumes. I have seen probably 50 or more resumes. They just use the first thing on the internet or a latex template or a word template or they do it with a friend or with family or with a coworker - Your webui actually is as cumbersome as all the companies who require you to apply through their webforms. It doesn't matter how your resume looks when you are looking for a job in a bigger and more known company because you will have to type that stuff in some webform again - Recruiters exists and there are already recruiters who specizalize and are more edgy but you have to realise one big thing: You are entering this recruiter/hiring/resume market. That market is shitty for a reason.
At the end of the day, you are competing with customers which will never return. You have to build a product for this specific use case. If you are not in top 3 of Google Search results, they will not find you and they will not come back because they do not care for a resume after they got hired.
After they got hired and they might start using linkedin etc. recruiters will pester them and those recruiters will use their default templates and map whatever they are able to get into those default templates and no one cares.
I never cared about the layout much, i cared about the content.
Let me amplify that further - often when I'm using a recruiter to assist with hiring (rather than direct sourcing), the recruiters will take the candidate resumes and normalize them to remove formatting, layout and structural differences.
In my experience, mostly they "normalise" CVs to remove contact information (and replace with their own).
The reason is simple: I need a resume.
Now what irritates me a lot is simple: Why would you offer a subscription?
I think you offer a subscription because you would like to have a self sustainable business. You were looking for something small to build and want to make money. Subscription means easy money.
But thats just wrong. I'm finding your webpage in the moment i need a resume. I need it now, i need one pdf to send to companies and thats it. I don't need it monthly and you spend resources in building something which doesn't fit my need
So how to make it better?
Think who would like to use you: a) a student -> money is tight, never wrote a resume b) someone who worked before and probably has enough money
This person needs to see in a glance how much it costs to get that resume, how easy it is and how it looks.
Your funnel needs to do this.
You need to tell someone 'you will create a super simple and smart resume and you will be able to download it at the end by paying 5$'. You can extend it after that person has created the cv with 'look if you pay now 20$, you can update your resume for the next 8 month and we also have 3 additonal features you can use'.
Then make it savable so that if that person, really should not have forgotten you when searching for a new job again, they are able to go to your website and continue where they left of.
In 2020, even if you're a smart hardworking person and enterprising and so on, it's surprisingly hard to make a buck, much less a living.
Now, if you've worked at GCP for 10 years as an enterprise architect and your books is like "insights into using GCP" - that may not be very hard. You could make real money fast. But it took 10 years to get there, to accrue those credentials - essentially, to build your business.
10 years in, you might be able to make over 100k, on your business. But it took 10 years to lay the groundwork.
Now, of course, anytime anyone has an idea, it could be good, or bad. As a business, it could be a good business, or a bad business.
But seeing the forest for the trees here is recognizing that you're going to have to cycle through a surprisingly large number of ideas, and fight off a lot of other people who are trying just as hard as you are, in 2020.
Things that seem to have exploded onto the market overnight have almost always spent years building up under the covers
While I wish the author the best of luck, I’m not sure resume builders for developers are a hot market.
I'm not sure why people feel like they needs to make something in their early years before marriage/kids.
a lot of company started by people in their middle age because they spend their early years working in an industry, build up the knowledge and solved some of the problem they experienced.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/business/tech-start-up-fo...
By making that leap and going out on their own, they were able to accelerate that learning process and condense it to months rather than years (or never). Painful, but useful.
Why would I, as a customer, use this?
The resume templates you have on site is pretty much the same, somewhat generic ones that profitable resume building sites like resume.io, EnhanCV or VisualCV have. They are not the best templates for hiring managers in tech - even though some candidates will be happy to pay for them, as they think it looks professional. Don't get me wrong: they will work okay, but there are far better ones, purely for optimizing for hiring managers.
Congrats on the sale, but if you are serious about the "resume for data scientists" direction, you might want to think about the market size, and if this what you want to do. All the resume services I know of cater for a much larger audience to make a profit - and, admittedly, this is one of their weakens.
On your site, right now, there seems to be little evidence why these resumes would have an advantage over e.g. the default Google Docs Serif or Swiss resume templates (which, the Minimalist looks very similar to). Selling one-off resumes might not be a fantastic business, or at least it would be a very one-sided marketplace. As someone else was suggesting, taking it a step further, and venture into you also connecting vetted data scientists with companies.
I'm curious what you think of our tea plates, based on your personal research. https://standardresume.co/
Problem occurs when you dig wrong spot over and over.
For example, in Covid time I saw that people were printing face shields and other stuff, I quickly figured out that there will be major filament shortage in time to come and started creating filament: https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho...
I made €7000 in less than a month.
The next couple of milestones will likely be just as hard to hit if not harder. For your sake, I hope it is mostly hard work and not more pivots or learning.
Coming from someone that can appreciate every step of those past couple years for you and your brother. My brother and I similarly left salaried engineering jobs for the startup unknown. All the best!
I'm in a similar position with a product for people selling their homes. At this point I'm tempted to spend some money on advertising but don't know where to begin.
Have you tried ads at all?
What's your stack? (Since I work with Elixir which runs on the Erlang BEAM VM, I had to ask, lol)
I can't believe how hard it is for you to acquire customers, I truly empathize and I am not surprised you only made $10 since April. I hope you guys make it, it seems like "bulletproof" resumes are a good way forward to help people have a higher chance at job hunting!
P.S. what about cover letters?
Really wondering what's going into these recommendations? Seems it shouldn't be that hard. A job board with even a shard of understanding of technical preferences would be an improvement over the current status quo.
I honed in
the biggest problem they had time and time again when hiring technical talent: finding qualified people interested in applying for their roles."
I would possibly be worried if revenue wasn't coming in faster that my product wasn't really a hit.
Perhaps you could consider a better angle or target a more specific audience? I like the idea of charging companies that need employees (they are always hiring) rather than job seekers that need a job (they are rarely looking).
Examples of good angles:
Key:Values [0] (1 person, ~$30k/mrr) matches job seekers with company values, levels.fyi [1] (2 people, ~$5k/mrr) matches job seekers with salaries, and there was a job board posted here for "old programmers" (don't know the link). KV and levels don't need a "critical mass" of job seekers, they need a critical mass of companies that are hiring, so it seems to me like a good angle plus a small pool of company profiles could be pretty effective for building a jobs business more rapidly.
