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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
- 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.