How We Reached 1M Downloads And Went Viral On Product Hunt [Update]

Fernando Pessagno

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Published: October 16th, 2022

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Fernando Pessagno

Founder, Resume Maker Online

$2K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Resume Maker Online

resumemaker.online

from Malmö, Suecia

started August 2018

$2,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Fernando recommends to grow your business!

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Want more updates on Resume Maker Online? Check out these stories:

1. I Built A Profitable Resume Making Tool On The Side [700K+ Resumes Downloaded] (2021) ➜

This is a follow up story for Resume Maker Online. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 3 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

Hi there! My name is Fernando Pessagno and I’m an Argentinian product designer currently based in Sweden.

I got into the startup world kind of by accident — in 2018, I was dealing with creative burnout, so I decided to get back in touch with the fun part of being a designer by making more time for personal projects.

ResumeMaker.Online was originally just a fun side project, but it turned out to be much more successful than I expected. Being selected as the number one product of the day & week on Product Hunt was a huge honor.

That’s how ResumeMaker.Online came about. It’s the #1 easy-to-use resume builder tool that helps non-tech-savvy users design an effective resume in just minutes.

Because of ResumeMaker.Online, I was able to get in touch with some amazing people in the indie hackers scene and landed a great job at an AI startup. As a result, I ended up relocating to Europe. Not only has ResumeMaker.Online helped me further my career, but it’s also been a reliable source of income.

To date, I make around $2,000 per month from it, with only $25 in monthly maintenance costs. At the moment, it averages 80,000 unique users per month and over 35,000 newsletter subscribers.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

Total resume downloads are over a million — that’s pretty amazing, right? It feels great to think that I have positively impacted so many people’s professional lives. I've just recently beaten my daily sales record! I sold 33 resumes, which came to around USD 300 in 24hs. This shows that my goal of $5,000 in monthly sales is achievable. But the business hasn’t grown as much as I hoped in some areas.

SEO can be quite competitive. I used to rank second for keywords such as “resume maker”, but now I’m around fifth place. Although I reached 100,000 visits per month during the best months, it’s declined a bit lately and currently sits at around 80,000. Which is still an improvement over the past performance! But I would like to get the traffic back to its all-time high.

The competition is tough and similar sites have even changed their page title to “resume maker online” to try and get ahead of me on the ranking, but I’m tough too!

I’ve been working on getting more backlinks, and it’s been going well since our last conversation. I did a bunch of other interviews that got me featured on several websites, and I even went viral on HackerNews, which was great, but it’s always been a struggle to get noticed outside of the tech, design, and startup bubbles.

My target audience isn’t tech-savvy, so I wanted to get press coverage on more mainstream channels. I wrote a cold email template with a media kit attached and sent it to hundreds of journalists, but I didn’t have much success.

I decided to change the angle of the story. Instead of making it about the product, I made it about my journey. During that time, Argentina (my home country) suffered harshly from the pandemic's economic effects. The story about an Argentinian who fled the country landed a job overseas and was helping others do the same was much more interesting to a mainstream audience than just talking about a website. And it worked!

I managed to get an interview with Clarín, a hugely popular news site in South America that gets 20 million unique visitors a month. And a lot of other news websites picked up the story, which got me even more backlinks without me having to do anything.

Blocking out time is one of the best ways to maximize your productivity. When you have dedicated time for leisure and taking care of your health, you’re less likely to feel guilty about taking a break.

Also, during the first half of 2022, I’ve been focusing on adding new game-changing features. The truth is that creating a great resume is about more than just having outstanding design. The content of your resume is just as important.

To help users with this, I started collecting and editing job experience descriptions and professional summaries, with a little help from AI. Finally, I launched one of the biggest features yet: Resume Writing Assistant.

Many people find it difficult to articulate their words in a way that presents themselves in a positive light, and as a result, spend countless hours on it. However, these hours could be better spent applying for jobs instead.

This feature allows users to do just that — they can select their role and get access to work experience descriptions and professional summaries to use as templates, saving tons of time.

There are currently +25 roles to choose from, with over 700 templates in total.

I also updated the PRO downloads to be ATS-friendly. This means that the resumes will be optimized for applicant tracking systems, which is crucial in today’s job market.

Now that’s out of the way, I’m ready to turn back my attention to marketing.

I’m excited about the upcoming release of my blog and some new TikTok and YouTube experiments I’ll be doing. I hope to see some growth in revenue from these endeavors.

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

The challenge at this stage is to find effective ways to scale the business. Other challenges I face have to do with time management and not necessarily with product or marketing decisions.

I might have mentioned it in the previous interview, but for those who may not have read it, for years now I’ve been working on ResumeMaker.Online while holding down a full-time job.

I’m glad to say that I’ve been able to make it work. Of course, It's been a bit of a journey, but I'm really happy with where I'm at.

I wanted to take a moment to reflect on all that I’ve learned during this time, particularly over the last year. So, if you’re struggling to balance a 9to5 and a personal project, here are a few tips that might help you:

1. Block out time

Assign time for your full-time job, your startup, leisure, taking care of your health, and even for doing nothing! The best ideas come to me when I’m bored.

I wake up at 6 AM daily and start working using the Pomodoro technique. I take a break for lunch at 2 PM and then go to the gym. This helps me to separate my regular work life from my startup and personal life. Then I focus on my side business for 2–3 hours every day and then I make a rule to stop working at 6 PM.

This schedule gives me time to enjoy some of my hobbies and just relax with my GF after a long day. I have found that I am more productive and creative when I structure my time this way.

Blocking out time is one of the best ways to maximize your productivity. And when you have dedicated time for leisure and taking care of your health, you’re less likely to feel guilty about taking a break.

2. Make sacrifices

What is the most important thing you need to be working on right now? What can wait? You will never be able to do everything. You’ll have to pick and choose what’s most important.

Of course, it’s a balance, you don’t want to sacrifice too much. I’ve made some sacrifices in certain areas of my life, but I’ve been careful to not let them damage my relationships.

3. Plan ahead on Sundays

When you’re working on your full-time job, you’re in a certain mindset, and you’re focused on certain tasks. But when you switch to working on your startup, you have to shift gears and change your focus. This can be difficult, and it can take some time to get into the groove.

However, if you take the time to plan ahead on Sundays, you can set yourself up for a more productive week. When you have a plan, you can execute it without getting stuck trying to decide what to do next, which can be taxing on your brain.

4. Stick to your framework

I've found that it can be tough to find a productivity system that works well, but once you do, the key is to stick with it.

5. Take breaks

But if you feel like you’re starting to burn out, take it easy and unplug for a little while. It may seem counterintuitive, but sometimes the most productive thing you can do is to take a break.

6. Be part of a community

The journey of starting up your startup (especially as a solo founder) can be daunting and lonely. You often have to sacrifice part of your social life to dedicate time to your business. Belonging to an active community of like-minded individuals can be immensely helpful. You are not alone.

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Disclaimer: I've been able to juggle my full-time job and my startup because I work from home and don’t have a commute. This saves me around 10 hours a week. Anyhow, it’s important to remember that there’s no wrong way to go about it. Sure, taking the leap and quitting your day job can be a great way to get things started — but it’s not the only way, and it’s not always the best option for everyone.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

I’m shifting gears to marketing for ResumeMaker.Online. I’ll try different channels (newsletters, blog posts, TikTok, YouTube) to see what performs better, and I’m also part of the #buildinpublic community on Twitter where I’m sharing my journey in an attempt to build an audience. The goal for the next year is to grow it to $5,000 in sales per month on average and consider an exit. I can’t see myself continuing to work on ResumeMaker.Online for five more years. I love it, but there are so many other new things I would like to try!

On the topic of new things, I am planning on running a 30-day experiment where I will build a product and document the process in a series of short videos, from ideation to launch to postmortem. When I finally reach 1,000 followers on Twitter, I will start to work on this project, so make sure to follow me if you’re interested.

Lastly, on a personal note, I’m giving up video games in my free time to learn how to create my own. As a product designer, I’m always thinking about how to make things intuitive. Creating a game is much more about making things fun, which adds a completely new dimension. I’m loving the challenge and I hope I can transfer some of these skills to the startup world somehow.

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

Although it is nothing groundbreaking, I think Zero to Sold is a great comprehensive guide to building a bootstrapped business. I like that it's the type of book I could see myself writing someday, and it's the type of book I wish I had read when I was just starting out.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

The hustle culture is often glorified and promoted in the startup scene. Well, I think that’s bullshit.

There’s nothing wrong with taking things slow. Consistency is the key, not intensity. We often overestimate what we can achieve in a day, but underestimate what we can achieve over six months or a year. Be strategic, take your time, and most importantly, ENJOY the ride!