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Comment by bharani_m | Hacker News Reader

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

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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!

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!

Your biggest competition is probably livecareer.com they have an outdated Flash/Flex product and poor user experience.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.

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.

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 )

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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