dcaldwell

I thought one of the last sentences was pretty interesting. I've definitely been noticing more websites with larger images - Square, Desk.com, etc. I'd love to know how that's affecting these websites and if it's worth it in those instances to give up speed for the marketing advantages that higher quality images give.

Can you explain what your problems are with the wheelchair industry in regards to parts? I'm actually very curious.

In my experience with a nonprofit, on whose board I serve, this is exactly the case with PayPal. Even if you're very upfront before you send people to PayPal that yes, they can pay with a credit card, once they arrive at PayPal they get confused. I've even had PayPal show me a popup ad for a PayPal branded Mastercard when I was trying to checkout somewhere. Their UI isn't "branded" like the site that the customer was just on so that's confusing in and of itself. In addition, paying with credit card on a PayPal checkout page isn't the main action - you have to search for it. Combine all of those elements and you get a much lower conversion rate.

I work in the same co-working facility as an education-based startup that switched from using PayPal(where user gets redirected to PayPal) to Stripe (completely branded checkout) and their conversion rates increased 40% overnight and have stayed at those levels. After digging into their API, we're actually building our new company, MoonClerk, on top of Stripe's API. We'll basically be an abstraction layer on top of Stripe so that non-developers can use it and implement it on their site, with a focus on recurring payments (even though we do one-time payments). We really want to allow non-developers the ability to use Stripe.

Thanks. We're hoping to have some guinea pigs on the system by mid-September. If you have any questions let me know. I'd love to talk to people about what they're interested in using it for.

This is one of the most informative sales articles I've read on Hacker News. Great job Wade! I love hearing the nitty gritty of the early sales process. I mentioned this on the comments section of the blog, but I'd love to hear about how you guys are planning on creating a scalable and repeatable sales process as well.

Thanks for the compliments on the design. We kept all of the dev work in house. Three full time developers. Now with MoonClerk, Ryan, my cofounder, is a developer and we're contracting out some of the development but mostly with folks who are in our Coworking office or nearby. We develop in Rails.

OP here. I wrote this blog post to help the community - to share what I've learned and have done to get some traffic and have a fairly successful launch of a side project. Most of the discussion on this thread has been around resumes themselves and the business itself - which wasn't what my post was about. This really drives home one of the points that I made in my original post: Loft Resumes is polarizing. People seem to either love it or hate it. For some reason people seem to be passionate about resumes.

All that said, I'm really appreciative of the suggestions that people have shared both here and by email. I've learned a great deal from commenters on HN in general (a few have inspired another venture I'm looking at starting...) and appreciate the community, even though it can get a little harsh!

Please do.

It's not everybody's cup of tea. We understand that and that's fair. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from both hiring managers and job seekers who actually have responded the opposite of what you're feeling. So, I guess it just depends.

1) The project wasn't 1 month. This is just what we did in the roughly 1 month since we launched.

2) Yes, if you multiply the over 100 sales by our purchase price, we did over $10,000.

3) We don't convert html to PDF. Customers pick a resume design, upload their resume content (in Word or TXT or whatever,) and then we custom typeset it and send them a PDF as a digital file. Our graphic artists are great at making multiple pages look outstanding. There's also a revision process to make sure it pleases the customer.

4) The demos are really the designs you see on the site. Since all of our resumes are custom-typeset in inDesign by a graphic artist, we can't demo a customer's actual resume until we go through the entire process.

We're working on that. We've just been live for a little over a month and are still doing it as a side project. But, that's something we have planned.

We used a local photographer. We provided a lot of direction the entire time but he's also really good.

That's correct. Some people think we do the printing but we actually provide the visual design service. We're considering adding a printing service down the road. Even in doing our photo shoots for the site, we learned a lot about what makes resumes look great in the printed format.

Right now, we send out 2 hi-resolution PDF files - 1 is for full bleed and 1 is for normal printouts on an office or home printer. That way the customer has the option of how they wan to print out the resume.

Haha, my place in Greenville is well under this price and is 1 block off Main St. You should check Greenville out!

We actually don't print the resumes. We do the visual design.

Another great site to learn about Greenville is: http://lifeingreenville.com/

We actually haven't gotten many orders directly from the CSS galleries. While some designers do order our resumes, they aren't our primary target market (many of them will design their own.)

From our standpoint, it helps out with getting some solid back links for SEO purposes in the beginning and also helps from a referral standpoint. We also just like seeing and spreading great design. We're kind of passionate about that. Some designers will send the link to their non-designer friends because they don't feel like doing it pro-bono for their friend and the money their friend can pay just isn't worth it to create something from scratch.

However, if you have a product or service whose direct customer is designers, then you might be able to get some conversions from the CSS galleries. Your's could be this case.

Thanks for the advice.

- Any suggestions on how to make it intuitive to scroll down?

- We've thought about filtering but we've honestly seen no trends in which professions pick which designs - it's been all over the board.

- The shopper doesn't own the theme. Due to the copyright agreements that we have with the designers who created the resumes and the font foundries who created the typefaces, we aren't able to release the source files to be edited. Also, most folks don't have or can't use inDesign, which is what we use to typeset the resumes. We've tried to keep the price of edits low at $5 as a service to our customers because in early testing, we came across this as an objection. People need to revise their resumes or have different versions. We wanted to reduce friction there. We obviously don't make money on this but we just think it makes good business sense and is good customer service.

- We don't want to get into writing resumes. Instead, we'd rather partner with resume writers. They have a captive audience that's shown they're willing to pay for resume services. We'd rather get referrals from them than compete with them.

Thanks Michael. I remember that conversation and getting your feedback. Great to hear from you!

I read that post on Raganwald's blog the other day. I think there's a difference in having a "professional" resume format in standard Word document black and white and having a resume that's been designed by an artist. My guess is that in that story, Ernestine would at least give a Loft Resume a good look - sometimes that little bit is enough - you've stood out and gotten noticed. That can be half the battle if an employer is looking through hundreds of resumes.

We've been surprised at the variety of professions coming in. There haven't been any real trends yet - we've had everything from CFOs to college students to marketers to folks in the legal field. We originally thought we'd see mostly careers that had an appreciation for design but where the job seeker wasn't necessarily a designer (like photographers or people in the music industry) as well as marketers. I guess that goes to show you don't always know your customer until you start selling

We just launched about a month ago and have been doing our best to keep up with orders so haven't had time to do proper surveys. That's certainly something that we want to do in the near future. I think it would really help from a marketing perspective - having some great success stories. I actually got the idea for the business because a friend of mine hired a graphic artist to design his resume and he ended up getting a ton of call and interest - many of them saying that they were impressed with his designed resume.

I'm thinking about doing another blog post about this specifically - how I research and contact bloggers.

That's certainly been brought up to us before. We've run our resumes through parsing software and they've actually performed well. We don't advertise that because we haven't run every resume through every parser, so we can't say that they perform as well as Text files. Our advice for folks who are submitting to places where resume parsing software may be used is that they have a text version of their resume on hand as well and then use the Loft Resume for interviews and emails.

Most statistics show that 70% of jobs are found through personal networking, while 30% are found through career boards (like Monster.com.) We feel like we fit well with those 70%. However, even within the 30% of jobs that are found through career boards, most of those end in an email and an interview. We think a Loft Resume is a great way to stand out when job candidates do land that interview.

Yes, we actually did better than that. I had tweeted about that so that's where the number came from.

Emory, my cofounder, designed the website and a few of the resumes. We contracted with some really talented designers regionally and around the country for the rest of the resumes. We didn't want to have the same look and feel for all of them so we plan to continue to use a variety of great designers.

We have graphic artists that custom typeset the resumes manually. There are 2 revision rounds included in each purchase (additional revisions/edits/versions can be purchased) so there's back and forth with our artists.

Thanks for the constructive feedback.You're right, these resumes won't be right for certain industries, for instance banking. We're OK with it not being for everybody as long as we can find a big enough niche.

Regarding the pricing, we charge $99 for the initial design. However, if the customer wants any additional versions they are $5/version not $10. Obviously if someone is creating a new version of their resume for 100 different positions, it wouldn't be financially feasible for them. However, if they are targeting $5 companies, I don't think spending $20 extra is a huge hurdle to overcome, particularly if you think of the resume as an investment. If it can give you a better chance of getting noticed, it can be the difference of making an $9/hour at Starbucks or $60,000/year in an ad agency. Just my thoughts, but I do appreciate your feedback.

Thanks. I'd love to know if you have any favorites.