I think I understand that you’ve pivoted to selling a resume builder for data science workers.<p>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.<p>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, <i>not least</i> that these workers are extraordinarily valuable to corporations right now.<p>I get that you want to aim at workers first for cultural reasons.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Now, how do you keep your culture and values? There are lots of possibilities — you could keep charging the $10, but offer to forward the candidate to companies that match the resumé. You could make a ‘transparency pledge’ to the workers, as well as do revenue sharing with them.<p>You could build out the site into a trusted sort of glassdoor for ML workers where people (that you have vetted, I’d suggest) can anonymously tell others (and most importantly, you) which companies are good and which are bad.<p>At any rate, I’d strongly urge you to think about hitching up your economics to the side of the market that can get tens of millions of dollars of value out of the people you’re working so hard to help — keep helping the people you want to; getting them a job is a lot more help than prettying up their resume.<p>And, congrats on the sale! It feels good when someone wants what you’re selling :)
You will not like the path you are on.<p>- Google Namedropping is annoying like hell and i have seen it plenty of times. You will not feel great if you need to bring that up all the time
- When i google for Resumes, resume.io is the first hit with ad and it cost 3$
- 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I never cared about the layout much, i cared about the content.
The really useful lesson that I'd like to highlight here is:<p>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.<p>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.<p>10 years in, you might be able to make over 100k, on your business. But it took 10 years to lay the groundwork.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>Why would I, as a customer, use this?
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://thetechresume.com/" rel="nofollow">https://thetechresume.com/</a>
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.
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.<p>Problem occurs when you dig wrong spot over and over.<p>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:
<a href="https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-home-for-cheap-6c908bb09922" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho...</a><p>I made €7000 in less than a month.
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.<p>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.<p>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!
Great post, I enjoyed reading it.<p>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.<p>Have you tried ads at all?
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.<p>What's your stack? (Since I work with Elixir which runs on the Erlang <i>BEAM</i> VM, I had to ask, lol)
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.
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.<p>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>P.S. what about cover letters?
>> 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<p>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 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
>"Finally, after bumbling around for 7 months I started to get somewhere with my conversations with hiring managers.<p>I honed in<p><i>the biggest problem they had time and time again when hiring technical talent: finding qualified people interested in applying for their roles.</i>"
Congrats on the revenue!<p>I would possibly be worried if revenue wasn't coming in faster that my product wasn't really a hit.<p>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).<p>Examples of good angles:<p>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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.keyvalues.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.keyvalues.com/</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://www.levels.fyi/" rel="nofollow">https://www.levels.fyi/</a>
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.