How I Grew My Startup to 100.000+ Visitors per Month With No Time for Marketing
I’m the founder of ResumeMaker.Online, a resume-building tool that’s helped one million non-tech-savvy users easily design an effective resume and, as a result, stand a better chance of getting the job they want.
ResumeMaker.Online recently reached a huge milestone: 1.000.000 free downloads. Almost at the same time, it also hit 100.000 unique visitors per month for the first time. I thought it could be a good idea to write a simple recap and look back on how it grew this much without me spending any considerable time for marketing.
It’s been a wild three and a half years since I launched ResumeMaker.Online. I’ve moved to three different countries, held three different full-time jobs, and faced a ton of new challenges. From adapting to new cultures and settling down in a new place, to dealing with visa paperwork and learning the ins and outs of new organizations — it’s been tough to find the time and energy to work on my side project. Plus, I didn’t want to neglect my main source of income or my relationships. There have been entire weeks where I haven’t been able to work on my side project for more than an hour or two.
Eventually, I found a system that works for me and allows me to have more time. Although, in the early days, I needed to be efficient and focus only on efforts that could bring practical, long-lasting and continued results.
Here’s what I did:
SEO
Almost 65% of the traffic comes from organic search, and I had a great head start by being selected as the #1 Product of the Day and #1 Product of the Week on Product Hunt. This built up my reputation and led to countless backlinks, tweets, and shares from day one.
I was just a noob back then, not part of the scene at all. I posted it just for fun, not really expecting anything to come of it. But looking back, I see now how much impact it can have. If I had known that then, I would have taken more time to prepare for the launch and left less room for luck to play a major role.
After the successful launch, it became relatively easy to follow up. I wrote an UX case study, did multiple interviews and got featured on several indie hacker/Saas related websites and design blogs. However, it was always a struggle to get noticed outside the tech, design and indie hacker bubble.
I was trying to reach the average user, not tech-savvy early adopters, and my goal was to get press coverage on more mainstream channels. So I wrote a cold email template with a media kit attached and sent it to hundreds of journalists. Unfortunately, I had little success. I realized that it wasn’t time-effective to pursue both small, medium, and large publications. So, I decided to pursue only big publications and assumed that once a big online newspaper wrote about my product, the smaller ones would echo the story.
I was having a tough time getting any bites on my product pitches, and I was starting to get pretty frustrated watching my limited time go to waste. So, I decided to change my angle. Instead of making my pitch about the product, I made it about my personal journey. At the time, my home country of Argentina was suffering harshly from the economic effects of the pandemic and was under some of the strictest restrictions in the world. The story about an Argentinian that 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, one of the most popular news sites in South America with more than 20 millions (!) unique visitors per month. And turns out my assumption was correct and a lot of other news websites did echo the story, resulting in even more back links — all without me having to lift a finger.
I’ll try to be on the lookout for any new opportunities to pitch journalists with the right angle, rather than just talk about the product itself. Hopefully that’ll result in a better return on investment of my time!
I was feeling pretty good about the position on the search results pages for keywords like ‘resume maker.’ ResumeMaker.Online was on the first page in numerous countries, all thanks to its sweet backlink portfolio. But then the December 2020 Google Core Update came along and shook things up. The rankings took a serious hit virtually overnight.
I was in shock that the site might never recover. In a way, I’m glad it happened. It was a much-needed wake-up call to take ResumeMaker.Online to the next level and tick all the boxes in Google Search Console.
Back in early-mid 2021, I took a two week vacation at my full time job. After a much needed break during the first week, I spent the rest of the time fixing the issues Google pointed out and gave the mobile experience a complete makeover.
Nowadays, ResumeMaker.Online v2.0 ranks better than ever and the improved performance has really helped our ranking, not to mention the overall user experience and sales.
Multilingual support
I’ve added support for six more languages, so now even more people can enjoy my content! Data shows that although most traffic is in English, up to 10% of users land on non-english pages.
Watermark link
I was worried that if I started charging for my product, it would hinder its growth. So instead, I offered it for free, but added a watermark link at the end of the page. I figured that since a CV is typically shared with multiple other people, this would be a good way to leverage that. Turns out, almost 2% of my traffic comes from users clicking on that watermark — which only took me 10 minutes to add.
Share to download
When I launched the paid PRO version, I kept the free download available — but this time, it’s behind a share-to-unlock feature. So users need to share a link on social media to unlock the download link. I think that’s a fair deal.
Currently, users are downloading 25,000 resumes per month! And that’s not all — social media is responsible for 10% of our traffic each month.
Sharable discount link
Who wouldn’t want to share a discount link for the PRO download with friends and family? The traffic from this source may be low, but the conversion rate is double what it is for other sources.
Preparing for the future
It was important to be realistic about what you can accomplish in a limited amount of time. However, there’s no reason not to get ready for what’s to come, so I added a newsletter subscription form. It currently sits at 30.000 subscribers averaging +800 subs per week. When the time is right to start working on a newsletter, the subscribers will already be there!
The dream is to come to a full circle and end up in a situation where most things are automated and no active marketing is required from my part besides 2 or 3 hours of work per week, but with much bigger revenue than now.
In the meantime, there’s plenty more work to do, so if you want to follow my #buildinpublic journey, let’s connect: https://twitter.com/Fer_MOMENTO
