Show HN: Resumonk – a year after it was launched here

http://www.resumonk.com/?s=hn

by bharani_m • 13 years ago

69 34 13 years ago

bharani_m14• 13 years ago

I did a Show HN [1] for Resumonk almost an year back and got some awesome feedback & suggestions. I am about to finish college now and planning to work full time on it along with a co-founder.

So far it has got 17000+ users and a small percentage of them purchased the original $9 PRO plan. Based on all the user feedback, we have now revamped the product and added some of the widely requested features like DOC format support in the new Premium plan.

We would love to get feedback of the community on how we can improve the offering and build a profitable business. Thanks!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3934370

tarr11• 13 years ago

That's great that you kept at it for this amount of time. Perhaps you can share some more details about how you got your users or any other information about your business model?

bharani_m14• 13 years ago

HN definitely helped with the initial set of users. After that most of the traffic has been organic. Resumonk ranks pretty well for some keywords like 'simple resume builder' etc. We haven't started spending on online marketing as of now but it is something that we plan to focus on a lot more.

rkaercher• 13 years ago

Funny, although I'm only reading HN every once in a while I do remember your post. My first thought was that you would never get a decent business from that. Was very impressed after I had actually clicked the link and seen the site. Today I'm even more impressed, your site looks professional and you've found a pricing model that seems viable. Not talking about your 17k users which in itself is an impressive number to achieve! I wish you success and a sustainable business, you deserve it!

bharani_m14• 13 years ago

Yes, initially even I was a bit tentative about the product. I wasn't sure if this could be a viable business model. But the response and reception was simply amazing. Thanks to the HN community, I believe that we have had a good start but we still have a long way to go. Thanks a lot for those kind words! It means a lot!

dabent• 13 years ago

How did you decide on the pricing? Looked like $23 for 6 months.

bharani_m14• 13 years ago

We decided on the time frame for the subscription as 6 months, because that seemed to be a good time estimate for 'regular' job search. We arrived at the $23 price point based on our earlier experience of selling a PRO plan worth $9, and feedback of the existing users. Having said that, it still is based on our gut feel rather than backed by any concrete evidence.

Vekz• 13 years ago

Your biggest competition is probably livecareer.com they have an outdated Flash/Flex product and poor user experience. They have the SEO for "resume builder" locked down through use of fighter sites and multiple domains.

In addition to layout templates that you guys provide, they also provide quality content templates. Most people suck at writing the resume content and that is a core need.

In addition to the content need people don't see the value in using a pay for resume service when they could just do it them selves. If you can provide some metrics that like 75% of your users got a job afterwards then you have some more value.

bharani_m14• 13 years ago

Yes, it ain't easy to break in to a top ranking site for search results in this domain, but we are trying our best to build a useful product that catches the imagination of the users.

We are thinking about how we can help users with the 'content' part as well.

It is very hard to provide 'accurate' metrics without polling/contacting the users frequently and we really don't want to hassle them in any way.

deftnerd• 13 years ago

I would love to see one of the pro plan options to have a 3rd level domain like yourname.resumonk.com so it would be easy for people to just CNAME the address ( resume.personalsite.com )

bharani_m14• 13 years ago

Thanks. We have added a lot of features based on user feedback and will certainly look in to it.

websymphony3• 13 years ago

If anyone is looking for a completely free alternative, I have created HipCV for online resumes. https://hipcv.com

bharani_m14• 13 years ago

HipCV looks great. I just wanted to point out that you can create still create a beautiful resume with Resumonk's free plan. You would only need to upgrade to the Premium plan if you want additional features like .DOC conversion.

Best of luck with HipCV. I hope it goes well.

websymphony3• 13 years ago

Thank you, resumonk looks pretty great as well. :)

LAMike2• 13 years ago

This helped me get a job last week!

I'll use the updated version when I'm job searching again

bharani_m14• 13 years ago

Wow! Congrats! Really glad that Resumonk could be of your help. How can we reach you for a testimonial? We can't see your email address in the 'About' section of your HN profile.

LAMike2• 13 years ago

mvg210@gmail.com :)

andrewljohnson• 13 years ago

Maybe you could expand your market by doing other kinds of quick online document design. Instead of resumes, businesses might like to be able to generate attractive proposals, marketing, or fund-raising documents. They would pay more than $9 for such a service too. When I looked at your site, that was the first thing I decided you could possibly help me with.

It seems like you could have a pretty broad offering by replacing the templating functionality of MS Word for various documents. You can compete both on price and ease of use - I think Word ends up being pretty imposing for a lot of people.

You probably should stay out of finance documents though (invoices), which tend to get auto-generated by software. That would require integration effort, as I don't think high-value businesses tend to do invoices by hand.

websymphony3• 13 years ago

Have you looked at Bidsketch? http://www.bidsketch.com/

bharani_m14• 13 years ago

Thanks for your suggestions Andrew. Yes we would like to expand to other kind of online document design. We will have to identify a few good niche(s) and then take it from there.

Resume creation itself seems like a big market to us, and it would be great if we can help people do it easily than the other alternatives, we agree that MS Word has become quite imposing with each new version of Office and let's see how much we can simplify it for the users.

pionar• 13 years ago

I've used Resumonk in the past, and it's great. It's really surprising to me that this kind of service isn't more prevalent.

sown• 13 years ago

Just another suggestion: invoices was something I needed last year. I imagine, though, a lot of such services exist.

bergerb2• 13 years ago

The site is busted in Firefox

bharani_m14• 13 years ago

I just checked it on Firefox and it looked fine to me. Could you please tell me your Firefox version and your screen resolution?

bergerb2• 13 years ago

FF 20 - 1920x1080

It is fixed now. All text was black.

momchenr• 13 years ago

From a design standpoint, I think that your mix of flat-ui and non-flat elements gives it a strange feel. For example, your headline has shadow and depth to it, but other elements are strictly flat. It's just a design inconsistency you might want to address as you mature.

bharani_m14• 13 years ago

Great suggestion. Actually, I started off trying to create a completely flat UI like the current design trend but I love shadows and gradients so much that I couldn't get myself to stop using them. I'll definitely keep your suggestion in mind when I am doing the next design iteration.

envex• 13 years ago

Looks good but the stock Flat UI icons don't really fit in with the rest of the design.

It seems like the two major "styles" don't work well together.

adambard• 13 years ago

I had this idea back in March 2011 with http://resumatic.net/, but I never really ran with it and it has by any measure failed (it's still up, since it costs me nothing to host). After testing the market, and my meagre design abilities, I decided that it wasn't the business for me -- I just wasn't sure job seekers would be willing to shell out.

So with that in mind, it's sort of cool and inspiring to read about someone doing something quite similar and actually making it work. Have you ever written about the process of building Resumonk as a business in detail? I'd love to read more.

bharani_m14• 13 years ago

I do plan to write about my experiences as a student entrepreneur in India. I hope Resumonk becomes a profitable business soon, and I'll be happy to share my learning about it.

Skoofoo• 13 years ago

I tried this at some point and recommended it to a couple people in the past. I liked the convenient interface, though I remember having an issue with my address breaking at an inconvenient location and there was no apparent way to fix it.

I eventually hacked together a solution using Handlebars and PhantomJS, which isn't as convenient as Resumonk, but it gave me the stylistic control I wanted without having to learn LaTeX. https://github.com/skofo/resume

bharani_m14• 13 years ago

Sorry about the issue you faced in the past. We have completely revamped the interface now and Resumonk now uses an in-place editor. Would love to get your feedback on it.

Show HN: Resumonk – a year after it was launched here

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