Show HN: Resumonk – a year after it was launched here
resumonk.com
resumonk.com
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
You could expand to include legal advice. Many serviced based companies out there need good documents. You have some solid ground work to really tap into a niche market here. But I think you should focus on the content of the documents more rather than the aesthetics.
Personally I would never pay for a resume design but I would pay for a set of document designs to support my business and if these documents would contain the right content it would make all the more valuable.
I'll use the updated version when I'm job searching again
It seems like the two major "styles" don't work well together.
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.
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
Best of luck with HipCV. I hope it goes well.
It is fixed now. All text was black.