From death’s door to ramen profitability
Growing a flatlined consumer website from 0 to $5k/month in 4 months.
The past few months have been quite a journey. Through a series of events, my co-founder Thomas and I were tasked with rebuilding VisualCV.com. This is the story how we grew a flatlined website from 0 to $5k/month in 4 months.
VisualCV has an interesting history:
- Founded in 2006
- Raised $5m in 2008
- Acquired in 2011 by Talemetry
The goal of VisualCV was to “reinvent the resume.” Users could quickly and easily create dynamic and secure online resumes, complete with multi-media uploads. The site was featured in Forbes, Businessweek and CNN.
Ultimately it was set to shut down in 2011 before it was acquired. The site was recently repurchased and we were tasked with rebuilding it.
Our goal was to take the assets we had and get to revenue within 3 months, creating a viable and self-sustaining project. Here is a snapshot of the metrics we inherited:
- 13,000 monthly homepage views
- 2000 monthly signups
- 2000 daily active users
- Over 300,000 “registered” users
Traffic since launching. It’s been steady since 2010.
As projects go we had a nice canvas to work with. Our mark for project profitability was $5k/month in revenue — ramen profitability for two founders.
Month 1: Learning
We inherited the Github repo from the old owners of VisualCV.com and got to work. The first priority was to learn from our users. We needed answers to 3 questions:
- Why were people using the product?
- Where did the old product fall short?
- What did we need to build?
Quantitative analysis:
We dug into our existing data to get an idea of who our users were, where they were coming from, and how they were using the product.
Generally users are in IT, marketing, and sales. They typically create 1 VisualCV, with 11% of users creating 2 or more VisualCV’s.
Qualitative analysis:
Armed with quantitative data, we began reaching out to our active user base to get a better idea of why they were using our product. Borrowing from the GrooveHQ.com playbook, I sent out the following email to power users.
We got some excellent feedback.
I first joined VisualCV back in 2009 because it was the best option for a Resume online. Still it is. Keep up the good work and of course I’ll be glad to keep on receiving your updates. Thanks for your mail
I struggled managing and updating CVs for a long time, and was looking for a way to access, update and share my CV, best part of all, i also wanted to be able to share not just std CV format but more professional achievements and contents. I liked the feature of the user being able to control who they would like to share the CV ie targeted audience as most CV contain lots of confidential info.
Helping me design a new resume and it was much easier through your website !! Thanks for everything !!
I don’t know who is running the show over there but your website has some serious issues my entire class had issues logging into your website. And the website doesn’t even recognize Sanford Florida as a city. None of us are happy campers.
Thank you for your note. To answer your question, I joined VisualCV because it was a pioneer in allowing visual content to be integrated into an online profile or resume.
Others have now followed VisualCV’s lead in including visual content, but in my opinion VisualCV still does the best job in integrating — not merely including — that visual content. In VisualCV, visual content in more than an attachment: it’s part of the main show. I look forward to the new version.
Thank you for reaching out to me. I’ve had a profile on VisualCV since 2009. That’s great to hear your company is working on a complete redesign of the site. I initially created a profile on VisualCV to showcase my background, skills, etc; however; honestly I’ve been favoring my LinkedIn profile as I feel it’s a more effective networking tool. I’ve certainly shared your site to the people in my network.
I signed up because it’s VERY impressive! Every time I go on an interview people are so impressed with it. They say “I’ve never seen anything like it!”
I love your service and share it with my friends and they have signed up and love it as well. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to present my career experience to prospective employers in a different way.
It felt like having a “website resume, “ along with the ability to include images & links to industry resources, added an extra ‘wow’ factor.
Overall hardcore users really did love their VisualCV, and we started to get an idea of Why people were signing up for the service.
We took more of an objective approach to answer the question of what went wrong by studying the overall market landscape.
Problems with the old VisualCV
It was trying to “reinvent” the resume. It wasn’t solving a clear and compelling pain point for job seekers. Resumes still exist, and will exist (for good or bad) for a very long time. This is due to habit, convenience, and applicant tracking software.
The Design was outdated. We actually didn’t hear this from any users, but personally we couldn’t stand the look of the old VisualCV. It was very 2004.
No clear monetization model. VisualCV was known as being completely free. They tried to monetize in a few different ways (charging companies, charging recruiters, or charging candidates) but there was never 1 path to profitability.
They raised too much money. We don’t have the pressure of 5m in venture capital. 10–15k/month is a decent outcome for a 2 person project, and we felt we could get there quickly.
In our opinions the biggest problem was trying to reinvent the resume. Creating and educating a mass market is expensive and risky, especially with no clear monetization model. We wanted to work with the existing market, not swim upstream.
Month 2: Building
Armed with some great qualitative and quantitative data, it was time to start rebuilding the website. This was our goal:
To enable people to create an effective resume in less than 10 minutes.
Simplifying the product
We needed to eliminate any complexity with the product, and launched with the following feature set:
- Resume parsing for extracting data
- 1 VisualCV theme
- Image uploads (no gallery)
- Video embedding from Youtube
- PDF Export
- Resume Analytics
We eliminated the following features:
- Video hosting
- Audio hosting
- Complex privacy controls (It’s now just public or private)
- Job recommendations
- Company pages/profiles
Marketing
While building we simultaneously tested our marketing. We made a new landing page using a template from ThemeForest, and drove half our traffic to it using Optimizely. Signup conversions increased from 8% to 22%.
We also spent time creating content for our blog and Slideshare. So far it hasn’t yet moved the needle. What I’ve learned about content marketing is that the easy stuff no longer works. Create remarkable content, or die in obscurity. To be honest, the stuff I’ve made isn’t quite good enough.
Month 3: Launching
We launched the new VisualCV to little fanfare 1.5 months after starting the new build. Moving terabytes of data is hard, and the 24 hours of downtime it took for the transition was excruciating.
We launched with a very bare MVP —1 CV design and a stripped down feature set — and sent out an email to our latest 20,000 users at 3am. The responses rolled in the next morning.
You’ve obviously changed the way it works. Images don’t expand, some sample work is represented but when attempting to check access it says it isn’t there. I try to re-upload portfolio items and nothing happens. The links to CVs don’t work.You don’t seem to support audio anymore, either.
Your site was wonderful. Why have you changed it. This is really a disaster for me!
What IS going on over there?! Yesterday your service was unavailable and today my CV was reformatted without my permission and it looks HORRIBLE. That’s just seriously subpar design. It doesn’t make me look good AT ALL. I’m extremely upset. If this what’s in store as per previous conversation, it’s time for me to find a brand new solution. WHY would your destroy my existing CV?!!! I want it back! I can then make decisions about how and if I’m going to continue with you based on what you offer. The signature is widget is also gone, AGAIN! And ZERO communication from your company. You just hijacked my CV and messed it up!
Overall the only majority of responses we got from the update were negative, but out of 20,000 users there was only 50 responses. The majority of people didn’t care, which was more concerning than the hatred. It’s better to be hated than ignored.
Mistakes we made:
Not informing previous users of upcoming changes. We should’ve given more advanced warning to users, and I don’t have a good excuse why we didn’t. I guess wanted to “wow” them with a surprise new product, which is a stupid idea. A few people were justifiably pissed off about this. We did however continue to support their legacy VisualCV’s so that no content was lost. Of the 50 negative responses, all but 3 people are still users today.
Not having enough design options. The design we launched with was average, and in some cases worse than the original VisualCV. In order to move forward we needed to get something out there that we could iterate on. Supporting an unprofitable legacy product was too costly.
We didn’t get any press. Our product wasn’t good enough at this point to get press anyways, but I should’ve at least pinged a few media outlets who covered VisualCV previously to let them know of the updates.
We got deindexed by Google. Due to our downtime and switch to HTTPS, we were manually penalized by Google. Our search traffic dropped to 0. This scared the shit out of us, but eventually the manual penalty was removed and we moved back up in the index.
Making the transition fast was a good move. It gave us ownership over our blank canvas, and it was a relief to build on our stack without supporting a legacy product.
Month 4: Monetizing
After launching we had a decent product, a decent traffic, and decent engagement. We wanted to prove out monetization as fast as possible to see if it was even plausible. VisualCV had always been a free product (they did try to charge near the end, but refunded all customers), and trying to monetize in a market that is typically free is challenging.
We decided our paid plan would be based on 3 triggers:
More Designs. People are used to paying for premium templates, as proven by premium theme marketplaces. It is by far the biggest reason for upgrading.
More resumes. The free plan includes 2 resume versions (1 public and 1 private). Power users had up to 15 resumes, and we felt that was a good case for monetizing.
Upgraded analytics. We provide quite a bit of detail in our resume analytics, including IP and time tracking. We thought that people who cared about this might also care enough to pay to upgrade.
Pro plans
The second we had more than 2 resume templates, we launched the paid plan. Conversion rates improved steadily as we continued to add to our theme inventory.
We started off with a price point that seemed very reasonable to us. We based our pricing off comparables like theme marketplaces, other resume building services, and our gut feeling. We didn’t ask users — maybe that was a mistake but we felt we had enough traffic that we could A/B test.
The Pro plan includes:
- Access to Pro Resume Designs
- Upgraded Analytics
- Unlimited Resumes
- Minimal VisualCV branding
Our initial pricing for the Pro plan was $2/month, charged annually. We rolled out Stripe, and on the first day made a cool $143.
Conversion to paid users was 2.5% at that price point. We raised prices to $36/year for month 2.
Conversion rates only dropped slightly to 2.1%. Our Pro users aren’t particularly price sensitive, but we are working on a tiered pricing system to allow that allows for a less expensive entry point for more users.
Money is great, but are users happy?
This is the question we need to continually ask ourselves. So far the answer is yes. We surveyed all our Pro customers using Survey.io, and the responses were overwhelmingly (surprisingly?) positive.
- 79% of users recommended VisualCV to a friend
- 50% of users would be very disappointed if VisualCV no longer existed
- 40% would be somewhat disappointed
Another interesting point is that paid users are more engaged and happier customers. Therefore to increase our happiness rate, we need to increase our rate of paid customers.
What’s next for VisualCV?
Since hitting the 5k revenue mark we have been working on optimizing the product, adding features, and experimenting with new growth channels.
We’ve been experimenting with just about everything — different pricing strategies, onboarding, and marketing tactics. So far we’re seeing incremental wins, but nothing exponential.
Searching for growth
Growth is our number one priority. Here are a few tactics we’re trying using the Bullseye framework:
- SEO: We launched a really neat content site full of VisualCV examples to capture long tail SEO.
- Press: So far no one cares about us, but we’re trying.
- Virality: Attempting to build viral hooks into the product.
- Partnerships: Wherever job seekers need a resume, we want to help them build a better one.
- Google Chrome Store: 600 signups so far!
Working on a consumer product has been a rewarding experience. Little tweaks can make a big impact, and getting continuous feedback from users is extremely valuable. We’re fortunate to work on a product that so many people use and love.
Stay tuned for more posts on our journey to a profitable consumer product.
Update: 1 month after writing this we’ve increased signups by over 400%. I’ll tell you how in my next post.
