Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000 • Hacker News Board

Re: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000

#111

Post by beza1e1 » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 6:22 AM UTC

dcaldwell wrote: post #96

phzbOx wrote: post #90

Few questions: 1. How did you manage to get all these awesome resume templates?! That's fairly impressive for a one month project.. I could have had only one of them and I would be proud! 2. There's no talk about the 10,000$ in the blog.. where does it come from? Is it 100 sales? Is it less but with more urgent need (For instance, clicking "1 day" or "custom color"). 3. About the process of converting the html templa…

1) The project wasn't 1 month. This is just what we did in the roughly 1 month since we launched. 2) Yes, if you multiply the over 100 sales by our purchase price, we did over $10,000. 3) We don't convert html to PDF. Customers pick a resume design, upload their resume content (in Word or TXT or whatever,) and then we custom typeset it and send them a PDF as a digital file. Our graphic artists are great at making mul…

I think you should market your manual process more aggressively. Generating from templates is easy and cheap, but that a professional graphic artist is doing it, makes quite a difference.

Re: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000

#112

Post by buro9 » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 7:11 AM UTC

azov wrote: post #102

alain94040 wrote: post #97

As a former hiring manager, I looked at your 100 first templates, and I must say that I don't like them. Yes, they look amazing and I would hire you to design my site's CSS, but for a job seeker, they are distracting. I want to see the job experience. I don't need special effects around "job experience", I don't need fancy backgrounds which make it harder to read the information. Sorry to be negative. Again, the desi…

I do my fair share of hiring and interviewing, and I agree with alain94040. I have very hard time imagining that the rock star developer I'm trying to hire will spend $100 (or hours of their time) to add fancy styling to their resume. Why would they? It just seems like trying too hard. Of course I won't reject anyone because their resume looks "too pretty", but those templates make the resume stand out, and not neces…

I also want to third this, for tech hiring anyway.

I have far more time for a plain text resume that fits on one side of A4/Legal, than I do for anything else.

It's all about how quick I can scan the document and extract information from it that might tell me what experience a candidate might have.

For me, the quickest way I can scan something is to have it feel like something I work with every day: logically laid out text, in fixed width, with related chunks fitting on the same screen.

Give me a plain text resume any day. If you deeply feel the need, add syntax highlighting in the form of very subtle highlights and lowlights to make the most pertinent sections and key facts stand out. But if you do that, bear in mind that such highlights and lowlights should be the minority of your document.

Do I practise what I preach? Yes: http://www.buro9.com/cv.txt

Re: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000

#113

Post by ErrantX » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 8:18 AM UTC

underwater wrote: post #37

ErrantX wrote: post #31

They look nice. In my experience clean/light CV's are by far the best for almost every job - particularly engineering jobs. The exception being designers. What sort of CV's are you seeing come in? I know quite a few HR types who will find a snazzy looking CV and instantly demote it, on the basis that the sizzle is probably hiding some inadequacy (this is not necessarily a bad marker in my experience). It would be int…

Interestingy filtering results like that is the complete opposite of what the recent "I don't hire unlucky people." post suggested ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3804134 ). This is also the stuff that gives job seekers nightmares. The whole process is already a black box and knowing that some (or all?) employers penalize resumes that are trying too hard just adds more noise to the many conflicting pieces of in…

I read that post with interest. It certainly makes some good points. the typo example, certainly.

However; in my experience, certain things do automatically mark out a cv as a poor fit - one of which is "too flashy". This is born out of originally giving everyone a read/shot and finding the flashy ones were, every time, not so good.

I dont agree it is a black box btw; if you do a little googling the advice is fairly standard - keep it to 2 pages, keep it clean and readable, 12pt font.

The idea of fitting a standard model is a good one; making the recruiters life easy is a good thing, and a different looking CV can interrupt your workflow.

Re: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000

#114

Post by lusr » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 8:37 AM UTC

csytan wrote: post #106

guynamedloren wrote: post #105

I am amazed that this business works. I'm not saying it's a bad product, but rather that there doesn't appear to be much of a product market fit. Here's why: the fields that would see value in creative resumes like these are creativity driven fields - specifically graphic design, web development, visual design, print design, frontend, etc. Creative resumes can be valuable in these fields because they are a means to s…

Just because someone is in a non-design field doesn't mean they don't appreciate design. Even though two resumes might say the same thing in text, the better designed one will convey important information more efficiently. By standing out, you show your potential employer that you cared enough to spent some time (or money) on trying to impress them.

While I completely agree with your point that a good design is important, I hope there's nobody on a tight budget reading this and thinking "damn now I have to spend $100 to keep up with the market".

My CV consistently receives praise. My secret? A standard Microsoft Word template that I have never seen anybody else use despite reviewing plenty of CVs myself :)

Re: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000

#115

Post by toumhi » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 8:47 AM UTC

dcaldwell wrote: post #22

dglassan wrote: post #2

Good read, congrats and thanks for sharing! Did you guys come up with all of those resume designs yourself? Or did you have any outside help?

Emory, my cofounder, designed the website and a few of the resumes. We contracted with some really talented designers regionally and around the country for the rest of the resumes. We didn't want to have the same look and feel for all of them so we plan to continue to use a variety of great designers.

How did you go about finding these designers? I've had some success finding correct designers on odesk, but it can be quite hard and time-consuming to find a good fit (and it really depends on your budget, in your case you can afford to hire expensive top-notch designers I guess).

Re: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000

#116

Post by azov » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 9:19 AM UTC

beza1e1 wrote: post #110

alain94040 wrote: post #97

As a former hiring manager, I looked at your 100 first templates, and I must say that I don't like them. Yes, they look amazing and I would hire you to design my site's CSS, but for a job seeker, they are distracting. I want to see the job experience. I don't need special effects around "job experience", I don't need fancy backgrounds which make it harder to read the information. Sorry to be negative. Again, the desi…

Would you be impressed by more subtle qualities? Let's say a design with special effects, but printed with a professional printer on thicker paper. Maybe subtle effects like watermarks or micro embossing.

Not really. After all I want my developers to write code that is, almost above all, simple (next only to working). So, showing a little appreciation for simplicity is a better way to impress me :)

Re: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000

#117

Post by Tycho » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 10:00 AM UTC

Great stuff. I hope you earn more advertising/publicity from that blog post than you earn copycats.

May I suggest that you add more single column resumes. Having multiple columns and boxes etc. is something I associate with newsletters and magazine articles. If I was shopping, I probably wouldn't buy one like that.

Re: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000

#118

Post by sirwitti » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 10:18 AM UTC

thanks for the article. one thing that i didn't understand when coming to the website was what to do.

choosing a design for example: i think many people won't understand that you have to choose a design below the featured block.

a headline like "choose a design:" or something could increase your conversion rates i guess.

nice project btw. have fun, witti

Re: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000

#119

Post by dcaldwell » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 12:00 PM UTC

OP here. I wrote this blog post to help the community - to share what I've learned and have done to get some traffic and have a fairly successful launch of a side project. Most of the discussion on this thread has been around resumes themselves and the business itself - which wasn't what my post was about. This really drives home one of the points that I made in my original post: Loft Resumes is polarizing. People seem to either love it or hate it. For some reason people seem to be passionate about resumes.

All that said, I'm really appreciative of the suggestions that people have shared both here and by email. I've learned a great deal from commenters on HN in general (a few have inspired another venture I'm looking at starting...) and appreciate the community, even though it can get a little harsh!

Re: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000

#120

Post by readme » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 12:03 PM UTC

Looks like a beautiful site. However I was disappointed to see that nothing about the 10k figure in the link title was mentioned in the article. I would be very interested in another article if you'd be willing to detail your revenue, expenses, profits, conversion rate, and such. I understand that is sensitive data and you may not want to, but it can't hurt to ask.

Best of luck, and your resumes look beautiful.