dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000
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.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000
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
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000
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.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000
I'm thinking about doing another blog post about this specifically - how I research and contact bloggers.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000
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.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000
Yes, we actually did better than that. I had tweeted about that so that's where the number came from.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000
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.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: Side Project: 1 Month, $10,000
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.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: Show HN: My new project - designer resumes to help job seekers stand out
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.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: Show HN: My new project - designer resumes to help job seekers stand out
Thanks. I'd love to know if you have any favorites.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works
I understand the author's frustration that Congress does not understand how the internet works. But does anyone know of any simple article or books that would be able to teach non-tech savvy Congressmen how the internet works? The material would probably need to be short enough for them to digest in 1 full day at a maximum. If anyone has any great suggestions, I would be happy to pass them along to my Congressman.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: Why we ditched PayPal for Stripe
From what I understand, one of the differences between WePay and Stripe is that WePay allows marketplace transactions where the app creator can take a cut of the transaction (similar to Paypal's adaptive payments API). I don't believe that Stripe allows marketplace transactions. WePay doesn't currently handle the dunning process for recurring payments but they plan to do so at the beginning of the year. Stripe currently handles the dunning process. At Bellstrike, we use WePay's API and have had nothing but good things to say about them. Their customer service is outstanding and we always have access to their developers, usually within minutes. We're getting ready to implement their iFrame solution as well. I've talked to some others that are using Stripe and they are pleased - particularly with the fact that Stripe only requires the credit card number and expiration date for a transaction - no other info. I guess it just depends on what you're looking for but I'd recommend WePay from my experience. We had a terrible time with PayPal.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: S. Korean Grocery Chain Brings the Store to the People
I think this is one of the best marketing uses of QR codes and a mobile app that I've seen. It actually solves a real problem and brings in revenue.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: 14 Days Later: What I’ve learned in the first 2 weeks of my startup
I've actually got a blog post planned for that :) I'd love to get a little more traction so I actually have something to write about though. But a big thing is just that people like to talk about designy stuff on Twitter a lot
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: 14 Days Later: What I’ve learned in the first 2 weeks of my startup
Thanks. We're actually setup as a for-profit. But I really want to provide value and help nonprofits out on our blog. I'll probably write a post about how they can use this service with Reddit.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: 14 Days Later: What I’ve learned in the first 2 weeks of my startup
We used the amazing @rogie (twitter handle) for the design of Bellstrike.com and the amazing @squaredeye for 3 of our templates/themes. We iterated on some of their work in house and did some other minor design stuff ourselves.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: 14 Days Later: What I’ve learned in the first 2 weeks of my startup
We don't have any type of affiliate relationship with Hover. Most of our target market is not super tech savvy and I just think Hover is one of, if not the, easiest to use registrars out there. Right now, nonprofits have to just forward their custom domain to their Bellstrike domain. However, we have plans to implement domain masking. If we do integrate with Hover's API, we could manage their DNS settings for them (if they choose) or just give them good instructions. It's kind of hard to give great instructions on DNS settings to a non tech savvy audience though because every registar is different.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: 14 Days Later: What I’ve learned in the first 2 weeks of my startup
Thanks for the advice. We definitely need to do some A/B testing on the price. (Also to answer the question, I didn't edit the post - it's the original text).
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: 14 Days Later: What I’ve learned in the first 2 weeks of my startup
I'd love to target them. Do you know the best way to do so? I have a feeling it's a pretty fragmented market so it could be difficult to get in front of a large group of them in a single publication, website, or conference.
dcaldwell
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14 years ago
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on: 14 Days Later: What I’ve learned in the first 2 weeks of my startup
We'll have to grab coffee sometime
