
Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue - stephen_greet
https://www.beamjobs.com/startups/2-years-to-make-10-dollars-in-software-revenue
======
vessenes
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
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.

~~~
dataminded
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.

~~~
literallycancer
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.

~~~
dataminded
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.

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

~~~
fampi
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.

~~~
jacob_rezi
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](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.

------
julianeon
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
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

------
Brazilian-Sigma
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.

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

~~~
doteka
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.

------
ackbar03
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
> 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...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/29/business/tech-start-up-founders-
nest.html)

~~~
bananaface
Appetite for risk and energy both decrease with age.

~~~
mattmanser
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...](https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-
startup-founder-is-45)

~~~
ackbar03
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.

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

Even if it's just copying your employer.

------
cosmodisk
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.

------
aeden
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.

------
dsaavy
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
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.

------
bananaface
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
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.

------
treis
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.

------
gregdoesit
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
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/)

------
Roritharr
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.

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

------
bobloblaw45
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.

~~~
Aperocky
> products to solve problems

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

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

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

~~~
throwaway744678
What's PMF?

~~~
aeden
PMF = Product Market Fit

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

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

~~~
StavrosK
Ah, I see, thank you.

------
econcon
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...](https://medium.com/endless-
filament/make-your-filament-at-home-for-cheap-6c908bb09922)

I made €7000 in less than a month.

------
harrisonjackson
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!

------
etewiah
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?

------
pmarreck
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)

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

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

------
orliesaurus
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?

------
mNovak
>> 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.

------
catchmeifyoucan
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

------
peter_d_sherman
>"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._ "

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

------
MartianSeal
Have you seen [https://jsonresume.org/](https://jsonresume.org/) ?

------
tbran
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/)

------
cinbun8
I clicked the link thinking the title said 10 million. haha!

------
jbarnett2
Nice! Congrats on the pivot

------
jkinudsjknds
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.

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

~~~
asimilator
Blank white page when javascript is disabled.

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

