Since my last company update, we’ve become a real business! We have people working for us, and more importantly, we have company t-shirts. (Okay, technically, they’re still being shipped, but I’m counting it).
We launched our resume product in June 2020, and to date, people have created over 750K resumes on our site.
My last update was when we had around 5K resumes created, so by my scientific calculation, we’ve made 140x more mistakes since then.
I like to reflect on our business through the lens of our mistakes. I think it stems from my critical penalty kick miss in the 1st-grade soccer finals (I’m sorry, Sharks). Not to say I don’t celebrate the accomplishments, but sometimes looking at mistakes can be instructive.
Investing Too Much in One Feature
We recently (as in the last few weeks) hired our first non-founder engineer. We’ve had one engineer working on our product for the last two years.
(P.S. That founder engineer is also my twin brother. He has a Twitter, and his whopping 15-follower count is starting to hurt his feelings.)
You’d think we would have protected his time carefully. Sure, that’s one option.
Another, more fun, option is for us to decide to invest half a year of his time into a feature we’re not sure will have a significant impact.
To our credit (?), we initially thought it would only take a few months. Three months max.
It was a massive project, though. Of course, we underestimated the timeline. We had never done something like this before. It was essentially a rewrite of our entire app.
Ultimately, we believe it’s a better user experience, but we’re having a lot of trouble quantifying it. It’s not moving the needle on the metrics that matter most to us. The impact should be more noticeable for a project that took 100 percent of our engineering resources for half a year.
When we want to launch our next big feature, we’ll break that big feature down into smaller features to launch and get feedback.
Not Hiring Fast Enough
We’re a company that spends revenue, not investment dollars. As a result, we grow slower and more conservatively than a company with investment.
Still, we waited too long to make a few hires.
Remember how I said my co-founder was the only engineer on the team for two years? Well, he was also the only customer service rep on the team.
He spent 15 to 45 minutes six days a week managing our customer service inbox.
We’re profitable. Cutting down on our monthly profit would have been well worth getting another 15 to 45 minutes of engineering time A DAY. This is a “smack your forehead; you’re a dope” kind of mistake.
I think, by the end, Justin was ready to take a pay cut to not have to do customer support anymore. The man is the only engineer on the team, and on Saturday, he couldn’t relax; he had to respond to customer service.
Eventually, we wisened up. We hired an excellent customer service specialist, and now Justin is entirely free of that burden, aside from the occasional technical escalation.
Pay for Compliance Where Possible
I hate corporate compliance. It’s by far my least favorite part of my job. The part I hate most about it is the helplessness. As a small business, you get screwed by states left and right with no recourse.
Compliance is, I learned, pay-to-play in some states. Case in point, our first employee is based in Washington State.
As such, we as a company had to register to do business in Washington. Fair enough.
We’re a Delaware C-corp, so to register in Washington, we had to submit something called a “certificate of good standing” from Delaware.
This is step one in the process. If you don’t have this, you can’t continue. I went to Delaware and ordered a $175 certificate of good standing on December 3, 2021, and they said it could take up to a week.
By December 13, I hadn’t heard anything, so I called. The person on the phone said I wouldn’t get it until April (?!) unless I got 24-hour processing. So I did it for another $235.
It’s July 2022, and I still haven’t gotten it.
Instead, I had to pay a company that helps with compliance $1,200 to register on our behalf in Washington. They got the certificate of good standing within 48 hours.
All we wanted to do was legally hire an employee. As a small business, there may come a time when you have to pay someone with more pull than you to remain compliant.
What’s Next?
Now that I’m committing to this newsletter for at least a few months, I’ll send these company updates monthly. We’re quite good at making mistakes, so I have no doubt that I’ll have plenty to write about.
Please let me know if you like (or don’t like) this type of content!
