9 ms·

Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue

213 points by stephen_greet 6y ago

mNovak 6y ago
>> it would take us 8-10 months to get our product to a place where it wouldn’t require significant manual work to send quality job recommendations 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.
sgt 6y ago
I like the clean design of Beamjobs.com. Wish that was more common.
- stephen_greet 6y ago
  Thank you, the credit for that goes to my brother. If it was left to me the site would look like some 90s monstrosity.
  - G4BB3R 6y ago
    The same. In the last 5 years my programming skills improved a lot. But my design (in)ability stayed the same.
- asimilator 6y ago
  Blank white page when javascript is disabled.
  - sgt 6y ago
    Today's web needs Javascript. I think what you are looking for is Gopher.
dsaavy 6y ago
At least they made it out of that first stage! Full-time employees get stuck in that stage all the time by just scheduling meetings but never actually getting any real work done that drives revenue. Looks like they were able to realize that meeting with people without a specific agenda and monetized path forward is usually just wheel-spinning. 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.
- stephen_greet 6y ago
  It's a good point, I just wish I learned that lesson a bit quicker. I guess some lessons you have to learn the hard way.
jkinudsjknds 6y ago
I can't tell who their target market is. Sounds like it switched from B2B to B2C but maybe they don't think B2C can actually scale so long term it's B2B? The author writes with a level of irony and self-awareness but it feels like he just wants to give it his best and see what happens without a particular need to be successful. And maybe that's fine. But I'd rank this particular approach as low probability of success and low potential of profit given success has been achieved and jeez running forward with this with one year of leeway in this economy is a scary idea to me. The again I'd never run a start up so not my idea of a good time to begin with.
vessenes 6y ago
I think I understand that you’ve pivoted to selling a resume builder for data science workers. 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 :)
- stephen_greet 6y ago
  Thanks a lot for the thoughtful feedback, it's much appreciated it! 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.
pmarreck 6y ago
As a guy in a, eh, boutique software consultancy with an employee count of "myself" and no idea where my next project after the one I'm currently working on will come from (although I've had some interesting calls lately), I'm just here to support your efforts and say thanks for blogging about your experiences. What's your stack? (Since I work with Elixir which runs on the Erlang BEAM VM, I had to ask, lol)
treis 6y ago
I've always thought that the talk to customers advice was bad as a starting point. If you don't have the domain experience to go to your first customer and say I built X and it solves your problem Y then I think you're barking up the wrong tree. Once you have customers it becomes important to talk to them for improvements. And when you have a product obviously you've gotta talk to people to sell it.
Roritharr 6y ago
Just a hint, a lot of engineers I talk to are desperately in need of career advice and they don't find a port of a call.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  But are they willing to pay for it?...
aeden 6y ago
I am honestly curious why, when you learned lesson 1 (Lesson: Don’t quit your job too early), did you not apply it? Find a company in a completely different space, carve out your business in your contract, and work your job while you hone your product. In 3 to 5 years you may very well have a solid growing product, or not, but at least you won't be broke.
StavrosK 6y ago
Hmm, why is the $109k in revenue not counted? I'm a bit confused.
- pcunite 6y ago
  It was a manual process and not software driven, my understanding. Now, they have a software product.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Ah, I see, thank you.
- microtherion 6y ago
  Another question I had about this figure is that they mention that typical fees are around 15-25% of salary, so the above would correspond to about $500k in total salary of the people recruited, which would mean… anywhere between 2 and 5 people recruited?
catchmeifyoucan 6y ago
I almost thought this article was sarcastic. It had all the elements of a “successful” founder. I was reading another article with lessons from the people, and I’ll have to say, this is a great mission: help software engineers put their job search on autopilot. It’s great that you learned a lot
realbarack 6y ago
I really appreciate posts like these that chronicle the challenges of pre-PMF life. Thanks for writing it.
- throwaway744678 6y ago
  What's PMF?
  - aeden 6y ago
    PMF = Product Market Fit
fampi 6y ago
You will not like the path you are on. - Google Namedropping is annoying like hell and i have seen it plenty of times. You will not feel great if you need to bring that up all the time - When i google for Resumes, resume.io is the first hit with ad and it cost 3$ - 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.
- jacob_rezi 6y ago
  this perspective is exactly right. I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on our resume software - https://rezi.io https://rezi.io
  - rileyt 6y ago
    Likewise with https://standardresume.co/ https://standardresume.co/. Our customers are primarily people working in the tech industry.
    - fampi 6y ago
      What i answerd to the person above fits your site very well. In your specific case, the problem is, that basic means 'no pdf' which basically translates to 'useless'. You have only a few seconds/minutes until a person will go to the next resume service page. They should not want to look for something else, they should think of buying a resume from you. Build and advertise it as a one time deal. Tell people that they can configure it and build it and when they like it, they can buy it a the end. This should be your first priority and when you have this fixed, then you can think about how to get those people back when they are looking for a new job in 2-4 years. No one can upload a web profile. Thats not a good feature for someone who needs a resume. If your web profile has a download button for the pdf version, then perhaps it could make sense but otherwise it doesn't. You are trying to hard building a subscription service but this is a product service.
etewiah 6y ago
Great post, I enjoyed reading it. 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?
cosmodisk 6y ago
Feel a bit sad about the author but I suppose they did learn some useful things they were not aware before. As for resume builder, the market is extremely saturated, it peaked probably 4-6 years ago when quite a few people made some decent money selling fancy looking templates on Etsy or even rolled out dedicated websites for it. My advice for all aspiring developers- entrepreneurs is to spend less time on developer oriented websites like HN or Indie Hackers which are often just echo chambers. Go out and talk to people who do some completely different things and your eyes will open.
- thatoneuser 6y ago
  For real. You should only be using HN as a social outlet, or for casual conversations. It seems like a lot of products shown here are just devs developing for what other devs talk about. Or abstracting a formula for how to saas and then applying it to whatever tech seems approachable. The majority of the real world is not HN at all. If your models are using this site as training data, you're probly gonna have a bad time.
ackbar03 6y ago
Your time-line is remarkably similar to what I've experienced, I also quit my finance job to start a business with a co-founder in 2018 at the age 26. It's also an online product but quite different so it's hard to draw additional parralels but I can totally appreciate your up and downs along the way. It kind of sucks sometimes but for me it's also why I did this in the first place, so I don't look back in my mid thirties with kids and a mortgage and wished I'd did something more with my life when I still had that flame in me. Best of luck! However it turns out at least you took your shot when you had the chance, sometimes that's all that matters
- MangoCoffee 6y ago
  > I also quit my finance job to start a business with a co-founder in 2018 at the age 26. It's also an online product but quite different so it's hard to draw additional parralels but I can totally appreciate your up and downs along the way. It kind of sucks sometimes but for me it's also why I did this in the first place, so I don't look back in my mid thirties with kids and a mortgage and wished I'd did something more with my life when I still had that flame in me 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-founders-nest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/business/tech-start-up-fo...
  - bananaface 6y ago
    Appetite for risk and energy both decrease with age.
    - mattmanser 6y ago
      Middle aged founders are the norm and more likely to take risks because they have financial backing and experience. They're also going to have been exposed to genuine opportunity, instead of a resume builder a college grad might think was a clever idea, and anyone else thinks is kind of a waste of time, as evidenced by the comments here. It's always been the case, it always will be the case. With the briefest of Googles you can even find out that's true even in the high-growth tech space: https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45 https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
sergiotapia 6y ago
Congrats on launching something with your brother! That's my dream, I'm the backend guy, he's the frontend guy. :D
barnyfried 6y ago
also grocery delivery...Thats gonna be big!
bananaface 6y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this business appears to be... A template? Like a word template, but the fields are separated so they're harder to navigate. Why would I, as a customer, use this?
- Etheryte 6y ago
  I could see the benefits if they integrated their current approach with what they used to do previously — fill out your CV and list your preferences, get a curated list of relevant openings. At that point however, they're directly competing with LinkedIn, Stack Overflow Jobs etc.
- gazelle21 6y ago
  I thought I was going crazy reading these comments.
cinbun8 6y ago
I clicked the link thinking the title said 10 million. haha!
orliesaurus 6y ago
Recruiting is a crowded space and for a tool that generates resumes, it must be hard to show the value prop. As a stupid example, even Google Docs and Word have a template for resumes....I bet a LOT of people use that and...done. 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?
jbarnett2 6y ago
Nice! Congrats on the pivot
MartianSeal 6y ago
Have you seen https://jsonresume.org/ https://jsonresume.org/ ?
Brazilian-Sigma 6y ago
It's beyond me how two ex-Google engineers and graduates of top CS programs with 2 years on their hands end up creating a resume generator that a CS freshman could have written in their free time! Not putting you down or anything, sometimes unexpected random things jam your workflow (like unfamiliarity with front end design), etc.
- cvhashim 6y ago
  Actually only one of them was a Google engineer. The other guy was an analyst at Chegg. But you’re right. The platform doesn’t seem that...special. But credit to them, they’ve done well advertising the platform and building networks.
- doteka 6y ago
  Last time I was on the job market, I wrote a little CLI tool that given data in yaml format, spits out a pixel perfect pdf resume. It took me 2 hours and about 200 combined lines of Python, HTML and CSS. While I wish the author the best of luck, I’m not sure resume builders for developers are a hot market.
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    There are qualitative differences in resumes. If they can sell theirs as giving you higher chances of success, that's worth something.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - doteka 6y ago
      I’ve been involved in hiring since my very first dev job - not sure I’d trust a random resume builder more than my experience sifting through 100s of them. But I guess there may be some small market here.
gregdoesit 6y ago
I happen to be writing a book about writing a good developer resume - from the viewpoint of Google, Facebook, Netflix Uber and other tech company hiring managers and technical recruiters as coauthors and reviewers [1]. The book is in beta and I've not advertised it beyond one or two posts, and it's made over $2,500 in a month. So there is definitely some demand here, though I cannot tell how much. 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. [1] https://thetechresume.com/ https://thetechresume.com/
- rileyt 6y ago
  At Standard Resume, we worked with hiring managers from several top tech companies and professional designers to make our templates that have been used by over 100,000 people. There are many factors that go into designing resumes, but the most important is always readability. If it's isn't easy to scan and read the resume, nothing else matters. The good news is that there is plenty of research behind text readability that can be applied to resumes. Having proper line spacing and adequate vertical white space are two of the most important. I'm curious what you think of our tea plates, based on your personal research. https://standardresume.co/ https://standardresume.co/
tbran 6y ago
Congrats on the revenue! 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. [0]: https://www.keyvalues.com/ https://www.keyvalues.com/ [1]: https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/
julianeon 6y ago
The really useful lesson that I'd like to highlight here is: 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.
- nikanj 6y ago
  Jeff Bezos: “All overnight success takes about 10 years.” Things that seem to have exploded onto the market overnight have almost always spent years building up under the covers
harrisonjackson 6y ago
I'd like to see this article come 6 months from now with $1000 or $10,000 in revenue. $10 is great (especially after 2 years of lessons hard learned) but I wouldn't say $10 is a signal of easier or better things to come. 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!
sky_rw 6y ago
+10 still pretty good for a tech company. At my last startup it took us 3 years to spend $7 million making $0 revenue.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  You have to tell us at least what space it's in so someone will potentially avoid spending 7 more million on it.
jmkni 6y ago
Just a heads up, the Page Title doesn't change when I navigate to a different page!
bobloblaw45 6y ago
With all these clever people coming up with products to solve problems only to have it not sell well makes me think the best idea is to just open a bodega or dry cleaners or something.
- calstad 6y ago
  Self-storage is the fastest growing/profitable bric and mortar business as well.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  > products to solve problems dry cleaner certainly solve far more problems for me than a resume builder.
SecurityMinded 6y ago
So, basically you have figured that you will not be able to extract money from big corporations with deep pockets and you decided to go for the small fish, i.e. the job seeker. What a novel idea... If I had a penny every time I have seen this model repeat itself, I could probably buy the fanciest drink in Starbucks menu. I was hoping for a miracle solution to make companies pay for a novel idea, but nope.. No such luck. If you can not rob the rich, rob the poor. Move on... nothing new here obviously.
- igornadj 6y ago
  Business isn't a zero sum game, providing a service isn't robbing the poor.
econcon 6y ago
Making profit is like digging for water. Can use crystal ball or tarrot card or pair of sticks, as long as you are digging in the right spot where water is found - you'll make money. 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-home-for-cheap-6c908bb09922 https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho... I made €7000 in less than a month.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
>"Finally, after bumbling around for 7 months I started to get somewhere with my conversations with hiring managers. 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."

213 points by stephen_greet 6y ago

>> it would take us 8-10 months to get our product to a place where it wouldn’t require significant manual work to send quality job recommendations 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.

sgt 6y ago

I like the clean design of Beamjobs.com. Wish that was more common.

stephen_greet 6y ago
Thank you, the credit for that goes to my brother. If it was left to me the site would look like some 90s monstrosity.
- G4BB3R 6y ago
  The same. In the last 5 years my programming skills improved a lot. But my design (in)ability stayed the same.
asimilator 6y ago
Blank white page when javascript is disabled.
- sgt 6y ago
  Today's web needs Javascript. I think what you are looking for is Gopher.

dsaavy 6y ago

At least they made it out of that first stage! Full-time employees get stuck in that stage all the time by just scheduling meetings but never actually getting any real work done that drives revenue. Looks like they were able to realize that meeting with people without a specific agenda and monetized path forward is usually just wheel-spinning. 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.

stephen_greet 6y ago
It's a good point, I just wish I learned that lesson a bit quicker. I guess some lessons you have to learn the hard way.

jkinudsjknds 6y ago

I can't tell who their target market is. Sounds like it switched from B2B to B2C but maybe they don't think B2C can actually scale so long term it's B2B? The author writes with a level of irony and self-awareness but it feels like he just wants to give it his best and see what happens without a particular need to be successful. And maybe that's fine. But I'd rank this particular approach as low probability of success and low potential of profit given success has been achieved and jeez running forward with this with one year of leeway in this economy is a scary idea to me. The again I'd never run a start up so not my idea of a good time to begin with.

vessenes 6y ago

I think I understand that you’ve pivoted to selling a resume builder for data science workers. 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 :)

stephen_greet 6y ago
Thanks a lot for the thoughtful feedback, it's much appreciated it! 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.

pmarreck 6y ago

As a guy in a, eh, boutique software consultancy with an employee count of "myself" and no idea where my next project after the one I'm currently working on will come from (although I've had some interesting calls lately), I'm just here to support your efforts and say thanks for blogging about your experiences. What's your stack? (Since I work with Elixir which runs on the Erlang BEAM VM, I had to ask, lol)

treis 6y ago

I've always thought that the talk to customers advice was bad as a starting point. If you don't have the domain experience to go to your first customer and say I built X and it solves your problem Y then I think you're barking up the wrong tree. Once you have customers it becomes important to talk to them for improvements. And when you have a product obviously you've gotta talk to people to sell it.

Roritharr 6y ago

Just a hint, a lot of engineers I talk to are desperately in need of career advice and they don't find a port of a call.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cosmodisk 6y ago
But are they willing to pay for it?...

aeden 6y ago

I am honestly curious why, when you learned lesson 1 (Lesson: Don’t quit your job too early), did you not apply it? Find a company in a completely different space, carve out your business in your contract, and work your job while you hone your product. In 3 to 5 years you may very well have a solid growing product, or not, but at least you won't be broke.

StavrosK 6y ago

Hmm, why is the $109k in revenue not counted? I'm a bit confused.

pcunite 6y ago
It was a manual process and not software driven, my understanding. Now, they have a software product.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Ah, I see, thank you.
microtherion 6y ago
Another question I had about this figure is that they mention that typical fees are around 15-25% of salary, so the above would correspond to about $500k in total salary of the people recruited, which would mean… anywhere between 2 and 5 people recruited?

catchmeifyoucan 6y ago

I almost thought this article was sarcastic. It had all the elements of a “successful” founder. I was reading another article with lessons from the people, and I’ll have to say, this is a great mission: help software engineers put their job search on autopilot. It’s great that you learned a lot

realbarack 6y ago

I really appreciate posts like these that chronicle the challenges of pre-PMF life. Thanks for writing it.

throwaway744678 6y ago
What's PMF?
- aeden 6y ago
  PMF = Product Market Fit

fampi 6y ago

You will not like the path you are on. - 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.

jacob_rezi 6y ago
this perspective is exactly right. I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on our resume software - https://rezi.io https://rezi.io
- rileyt 6y ago
  Likewise with https://standardresume.co/ https://standardresume.co/. Our customers are primarily people working in the tech industry.
  - fampi 6y ago
    What i answerd to the person above fits your site very well. In your specific case, the problem is, that basic means 'no pdf' which basically translates to 'useless'. You have only a few seconds/minutes until a person will go to the next resume service page. They should not want to look for something else, they should think of buying a resume from you. Build and advertise it as a one time deal. Tell people that they can configure it and build it and when they like it, they can buy it a the end. This should be your first priority and when you have this fixed, then you can think about how to get those people back when they are looking for a new job in 2-4 years. No one can upload a web profile. Thats not a good feature for someone who needs a resume. If your web profile has a download button for the pdf version, then perhaps it could make sense but otherwise it doesn't. You are trying to hard building a subscription service but this is a product service.

etewiah 6y ago

Great post, I enjoyed reading it. 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?

cosmodisk 6y ago

Feel a bit sad about the author but I suppose they did learn some useful things they were not aware before. As for resume builder, the market is extremely saturated, it peaked probably 4-6 years ago when quite a few people made some decent money selling fancy looking templates on Etsy or even rolled out dedicated websites for it. My advice for all aspiring developers- entrepreneurs is to spend less time on developer oriented websites like HN or Indie Hackers which are often just echo chambers. Go out and talk to people who do some completely different things and your eyes will open.

thatoneuser 6y ago
For real. You should only be using HN as a social outlet, or for casual conversations. It seems like a lot of products shown here are just devs developing for what other devs talk about. Or abstracting a formula for how to saas and then applying it to whatever tech seems approachable. The majority of the real world is not HN at all. If your models are using this site as training data, you're probly gonna have a bad time.

ackbar03 6y ago

Your time-line is remarkably similar to what I've experienced, I also quit my finance job to start a business with a co-founder in 2018 at the age 26. It's also an online product but quite different so it's hard to draw additional parralels but I can totally appreciate your up and downs along the way. It kind of sucks sometimes but for me it's also why I did this in the first place, so I don't look back in my mid thirties with kids and a mortgage and wished I'd did something more with my life when I still had that flame in me. Best of luck! However it turns out at least you took your shot when you had the chance, sometimes that's all that matters

MangoCoffee 6y ago
> I also quit my finance job to start a business with a co-founder in 2018 at the age 26. It's also an online product but quite different so it's hard to draw additional parralels but I can totally appreciate your up and downs along the way. It kind of sucks sometimes but for me it's also why I did this in the first place, so I don't look back in my mid thirties with kids and a mortgage and wished I'd did something more with my life when I still had that flame in me 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-founders-nest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/business/tech-start-up-fo...
- bananaface 6y ago
  Appetite for risk and energy both decrease with age.
  - mattmanser 6y ago
    Middle aged founders are the norm and more likely to take risks because they have financial backing and experience. They're also going to have been exposed to genuine opportunity, instead of a resume builder a college grad might think was a clever idea, and anyone else thinks is kind of a waste of time, as evidenced by the comments here. It's always been the case, it always will be the case. With the briefest of Googles you can even find out that's true even in the high-growth tech space: https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-startup-founder-is-45 https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

sergiotapia 6y ago

Congrats on launching something with your brother! That's my dream, I'm the backend guy, he's the frontend guy. :D

barnyfried 6y ago

also grocery delivery...Thats gonna be big!

bananaface 6y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this business appears to be... A template? Like a word template, but the fields are separated so they're harder to navigate. Why would I, as a customer, use this?

Etheryte 6y ago
I could see the benefits if they integrated their current approach with what they used to do previously — fill out your CV and list your preferences, get a curated list of relevant openings. At that point however, they're directly competing with LinkedIn, Stack Overflow Jobs etc.
gazelle21 6y ago
I thought I was going crazy reading these comments.

cinbun8 6y ago

I clicked the link thinking the title said 10 million. haha!

orliesaurus 6y ago

Recruiting is a crowded space and for a tool that generates resumes, it must be hard to show the value prop. As a stupid example, even Google Docs and Word have a template for resumes....I bet a LOT of people use that and...done. 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?

jbarnett2 6y ago

Nice! Congrats on the pivot

MartianSeal 6y ago

Have you seen https://jsonresume.org/ https://jsonresume.org/ ?

Brazilian-Sigma 6y ago

It's beyond me how two ex-Google engineers and graduates of top CS programs with 2 years on their hands end up creating a resume generator that a CS freshman could have written in their free time! Not putting you down or anything, sometimes unexpected random things jam your workflow (like unfamiliarity with front end design), etc.

cvhashim 6y ago
Actually only one of them was a Google engineer. The other guy was an analyst at Chegg. But you’re right. The platform doesn’t seem that...special. But credit to them, they’ve done well advertising the platform and building networks.
doteka 6y ago
Last time I was on the job market, I wrote a little CLI tool that given data in yaml format, spits out a pixel perfect pdf resume. It took me 2 hours and about 200 combined lines of Python, HTML and CSS. While I wish the author the best of luck, I’m not sure resume builders for developers are a hot market.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  There are qualitative differences in resumes. If they can sell theirs as giving you higher chances of success, that's worth something.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - doteka 6y ago
    I’ve been involved in hiring since my very first dev job - not sure I’d trust a random resume builder more than my experience sifting through 100s of them. But I guess there may be some small market here.

gregdoesit 6y ago

I happen to be writing a book about writing a good developer resume - from the viewpoint of Google, Facebook, Netflix Uber and other tech company hiring managers and technical recruiters as coauthors and reviewers [1]. The book is in beta and I've not advertised it beyond one or two posts, and it's made over $2,500 in a month. So there is definitely some demand here, though I cannot tell how much. 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. [1] https://thetechresume.com/ https://thetechresume.com/

rileyt 6y ago
At Standard Resume, we worked with hiring managers from several top tech companies and professional designers to make our templates that have been used by over 100,000 people. There are many factors that go into designing resumes, but the most important is always readability. If it's isn't easy to scan and read the resume, nothing else matters. The good news is that there is plenty of research behind text readability that can be applied to resumes. Having proper line spacing and adequate vertical white space are two of the most important. I'm curious what you think of our tea plates, based on your personal research. https://standardresume.co/ https://standardresume.co/

tbran 6y ago

Congrats on the revenue! 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. [0]: https://www.keyvalues.com/ https://www.keyvalues.com/ [1]: https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.levels.fyi/

julianeon 6y ago

The really useful lesson that I'd like to highlight here is: 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.

nikanj 6y ago
Jeff Bezos: “All overnight success takes about 10 years.” Things that seem to have exploded onto the market overnight have almost always spent years building up under the covers

harrisonjackson 6y ago

I'd like to see this article come 6 months from now with $1000 or $10,000 in revenue. $10 is great (especially after 2 years of lessons hard learned) but I wouldn't say $10 is a signal of easier or better things to come. 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!

sky_rw 6y ago

+10 still pretty good for a tech company. At my last startup it took us 3 years to spend $7 million making $0 revenue.

Aperocky 6y ago
You have to tell us at least what space it's in so someone will potentially avoid spending 7 more million on it.

jmkni 6y ago

Just a heads up, the Page Title doesn't change when I navigate to a different page!

bobloblaw45 6y ago

With all these clever people coming up with products to solve problems only to have it not sell well makes me think the best idea is to just open a bodega or dry cleaners or something.

calstad 6y ago
Self-storage is the fastest growing/profitable bric and mortar business as well.
Aperocky 6y ago
> products to solve problems dry cleaner certainly solve far more problems for me than a resume builder.

SecurityMinded 6y ago

So, basically you have figured that you will not be able to extract money from big corporations with deep pockets and you decided to go for the small fish, i.e. the job seeker. What a novel idea... If I had a penny every time I have seen this model repeat itself, I could probably buy the fanciest drink in Starbucks menu. I was hoping for a miracle solution to make companies pay for a novel idea, but nope.. No such luck. If you can not rob the rich, rob the poor. Move on... nothing new here obviously.

igornadj 6y ago
Business isn't a zero sum game, providing a service isn't robbing the poor.

econcon 6y ago

Making profit is like digging for water. Can use crystal ball or tarrot card or pair of sticks, as long as you are digging in the right spot where water is found - you'll make money. 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-home-for-cheap-6c908bb09922 https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho... I made €7000 in less than a month.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

>"Finally, after bumbling around for 7 months I started to get somewhere with my conversations with hiring managers. 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."