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Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue (beamjobs.com)
213 points by stephen_greet on July 10, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 75 comments



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 :)


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.


This feels like a good chance to do things that don't scale.

We write meaningful sized checks to recruiting agencies that look for people on LinkedIn and pitch them on taking our jobs.


Look, customers! :)


A bit off topic but - how meaningful & do they just contact people on LinkedIn and that's it? I'm connecting good people with good jobs on the side, so fresh market info would be quite useful.


Somewhere between $10K and $30K per hire. They only get paid when we hire people they bring us. Some recruiters manage to negotiate recurring fees but I have nobody working under those terms at this time.

Recruiters try to build systems more robust than cold-outreach on LinkedIn but most of my hires in the past year have come from cold-outreach tactics. They have databases of candidates but most of that database isn't actually interested in a new job at any given time and it's as productive to work the database as it is to work LinkedIn unless the recruiter has a friendly relationship with a specific candidate. Regardless, you can't sell a candidate to multiple employers in any given 1-2 year period so you always need new candidates anyhow.

If I had more free-time I would totally try doing this myself. The hardest part is getting HR to let you recruit for their open roles.


▶ 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.

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


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.


>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.


> 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).


this perspective is exactly right. I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on our resume software - https://rezi.io


When would i use your website?

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.


Good points. We see our churn being pretty high as one might predict.

This year we starting selling the software directly to universities (https://www.rezi.io/resume-management-system)once this picks up a bit more - we plan on making Rezi completely free for job seekers. But reviews are solid, I'm baised, but I think this is the best resume software in the world.


FYI - your site crashed my graphics driver the first time I tried visiting it. The second time it completely froze my PC and I had to cold reboot. Is it graphic intensive or something? I'm using a relatively old desktop PC, but in all these years, I've never had a website do that to my PC before. I'm using the latest FireFox with uBlock Origin btw - in case that helps you diagnose.


Likewise with https://standardresume.co/. Our customers are primarily people working in the tech industry.


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.


You use the term "ATS" above the fold (in the headline!) with no explanation as to what it is. I found this confusing and wondered why I would even want such a thing.


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.


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


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.


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.


There are qualitative differences in resumes. If they can sell theirs as giving you higher chances of success, that's worth something.


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.


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.


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


> 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-fo...


Appetite for risk and energy both decrease with age.


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-succes...


I think there's selection bias for success stories of both young and middle aged founders. For middle aged founders, I feel like the ones that you hear about, i.e. having worked in the industry for a number of years before spotting a good opportunity, also need to be fortunate enough to be in a position for all those things to line up as well. For me, I couldn't see that ever happening down my career if I stayed in my finance job, only being shackled to my job by the high pay. The opportunity cost of quitting gets worse as you become more senior. But who knows, I could be wrong. In my case it also made it easier that I didn't really like my job and that my boss was an idiot.


If you actually pay attention, you will see opportunity everywhere at your job.

Even if it's just copying your employer.


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.

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.


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.


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?


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.


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.

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/


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/


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.


But are they willing to pay for it?...


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.


> products to solve problems

dry cleaner certainly solve far more problems for me than a resume builder.


Self-storage is the fastest growing/profitable bric and mortar business as well.


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


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


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


What's PMF?


PMF = Product Market Fit


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


It was a manual process and not software driven, my understanding. Now, they have a software product.


Ah, I see, thank you.


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?


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-ho...

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.

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!


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?


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)


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


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.


Business isn't a zero sum game, providing a service isn't robbing the poor.


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?


>> 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.


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.

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."


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


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


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/

[1]: https://www.levels.fyi/


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


Nice! Congrats on the pivot


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.


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


Blank white page when javascript is disabled.


Today's web needs Javascript. I think what you are looking for is Gopher.


Thank you, the credit for that goes to my brother. If it was left to me the site would look like some 90s monstrosity.


The same. In the last 5 years my programming skills improved a lot. But my design (in)ability stayed the same.




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