Flavored Resume

I'm just over halfway through the ProductHunt launch and overwhelmed by the positive feedback and support. I love the questions and discussions people are bringing to the table. More-so the support from the connections I've made within the community and on LinkedIn have been amazing!

If I were to change anything about how I executed, it would be to give myself more lead time to build a community of followers. Expanding on other networks like Twitter/X would also benefit.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/flavored-resume

I've been very focused on polishing the product to have a solid launch. I can't get everything I want but I'd rather kick off the launch sooner than later (or never!). I've taken a page from other PH users and built a contact list to reach out to. As I only use LinkedIn and Reddit, those are my primary channels.

ProductHunt offers a wonderful feature to create a teaser page which I've been able to leverage when directing supporters.

The personal touch of building and leveraging relationships has definitely had the greatest impact on contacts so far. This is important to start early on rather than last minute where it can feel like spam.

The launch is August 31!

https://www.producthunt.com/products/flavored-resume

I've been able to work out a few kinks, primarily around dealing with different resume formats thanks to the help of some testers. The results have been great but as there are many formats of resume out there, I may not be able to account for them all.

SEO has also been top of mind to get more organic traffic, now it's a matter of seeing the results of my updates.

I've done some testing myself and everything looks solid. But I need more resumes to test out the functionality and flow. The app should be easy to use and work as expected. For now I'm starting a small beta amongst friends and colleagues to get their thoughts. This should give me some initial feedback and opportunities to make changes before turning it to a larger audience.

Up until now I just called the app "Resume App" as a placeholder since I didn't need the name right away. But as that is a terrible product name I needed something better and followed my usual rubric:

1. Define the brand: This is for job hunters who are annoyed with constantly applying and being rejected. They hate the process but know it's unavoidable. The most likely target market is millennials and Gen Z young professionals.

2. Two syllables and two parts: I've found the names that stick best are at least 2 syllables and are a combination of at least 2 words: FaceBook, DoorDash, and NetFlix (extra capitalization added to show structure). Of course, there are examples where the company is just one word (Uber), maybe misspelled (Lyft), an acronym (VRBO), or just a made-up word (Etsy. If "Etsy" actually means something please let me know). But that kind of brand name stickiness is much harder. Also, keep in mind what the name sounds like when you speak it. You're going to tell your friends and colleagues about it right? If it sounds weird or can be confused with something else, you lose stickiness. People will forget it or misspell it and it never gets traction.

3. The product name should reflect what the product is/does: "Resume App" kind of does that but it's also drab and doesn't align with my brand at all.

4. Associated web handles/domains: In this day and age everything needs an internet presence to thrive and grow. This includes domain names as well as social media handles. So when coming up with a name, along with following bullet #2, uniqueness helps make it more likely you'll find an available domain name and social media handle.

Taking all these into consideration I came up with Flavored Resume. I could have done "Flavume" or "ResuFlavor" but those sound weird. Flavoredresume.com was also and since this is a web app, .com domains are golden.

I've gone through multiple periods where I've submitted application after application with only a fraction of companies calling me back. During that time I did a lot of research and I took all the possible steps to get more interviews including hiring professional resume writers, reading dozens of blogs, meeting with recruiters outside of roles to understand how they do what they do, and meeting with career coaches. Key things I learned were:

1. Recruiters use ATS (Applicant Tracking System) to auto-read your resume and match your compatibility with a job posting. Your resume needs to structured so the ATS system can best parse through it so pretty resume's with lots of styles are not going to cut it.

2. A resume should be catered to a role. One size fits all doesn't work very well here. Although you can apply for the same positions (e.g. business analyst, data scientist, project manager, etc), each company and role will have some different expectations of what they want out of a candidate. Some might be more tech focused while others care more about how well you work in teams. The language of your resume should reflect your experience in those areas.

3. Grammar matters. This seems obvious but so many people apply with poorly written resumes that they've been rejected before they had a chance.

4. Your resume should reflect your accomplishments, not your day-to-day work. If you worked on a project that saved the company $50,000, you should add that. Don't put things like "responsible for quarter-end billing consolidation" as a finance analyst. What did achievements did you accomplish?

Although #4 is purely on the job seeker to provide, the first 3 items I felt could be solved with AI. Take a poorly written, poorly structured resume and rewrite it so it not only sounds better, but also reflects the candidates experience with what the company is looking for.