mightycv blog

MightyCV is currently experiencing random server outages due to upstream network connectivty problems. I am monitoring the situation with our service provider Heroku and hope to see all MightyCV’s back up and online again soon. Sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused.

This is the first ever Mighty CV cover letter to go live!

http://www.mightycv.com/86lxv6vi

I’d like the contents of the above link to count as my submission to the AppSumo Lean Startup Challenge. AppSumo deals are too good to resist, stop tempting me so often I’m trying to stay lean!

Hopefully you’ll find this feature useful. It lets you send a unique cover letter to anybody you like. You get a short coded unguessable web link for each cover letter that you create. This means your cover letter should remain private providing the sender and receiver do not publicize the link.

Think of a cover letter like an elevator pitch that travels with your résumé. It should only take 30 seconds to 2 minutes for the reader to digest and every second should count. I’ve made it easy to include a video if you want to and this could really help you stand out from the crowd. You could start getting creative and dream up some ways to grab attention on camera.

Cover letters don’t have to be private messages sent between two people. You could easily create a cover letter that you publicize more widely (e.g. you might decide to post a link to your cover letter on HN Offers). 

This is the first draft of the Cover Letter page and I think there is room for improvement. I could be wrong though, perhaps simple is better. Let me know your thoughts and if you find it useful. Here’s an example of a cover letter I created just after I lauched the private beta:

http://www.mightycv.com/86lxv6vi

I was a bit frazzled after a long coding session and so apologies if it seems a bit rambling.

As promised in the coming week or so Mighty CV will finally start sending out the first round of closed beta invites. Thanks for being so patient to all of you who have already signed up. We have 50 more slots in the closed beta which we are giving away today. All you need to do is leave a comment here with a way for us to get in touch with you and we’ll shoot you an invite. All 50 of the invites offered today will go out as part of the first bundle of invites we send.

Check out this preview of what Mighty CV has in store, but make sure you leave a comment here rather than sign-up on the site itself to ensure you are included in the first wave of invites. Ta-ta for now!

For those of you that have been kind enough to check out Mighty CV so far, thanks for taking the time. I’ve made some changes based on some of the feedback I’ve got and I hope those changes are for the better. Most of this valuable feedback has been from Hacker News readers and so instead of running time limited offers of one years worth of free service I’ve decided to just keep track of the referrer that people sign up from. That means that if you sign up from one of the links or comments I’ve made on HN I’ll keep track of the referrer and make sure your account is deemed free for one year. You’ll just have to take this offer on trust as I haven’t set up any sort of promo code system quite yet.

In the meantime if you have any more comments on how you think I could improve things further then I’d be most grateful for any feedback you can provide. To get your free year account just go back to the HN comments page and click on the link in the first comment I’ve made and I’ll make sure your email address is matched up with one years free service when Mighty CV launches:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2295434

So far the most succesful strategy to get people to pay attention to Mighty CV and sign up for the beta has been to promise to give away one years service for free after launching out of beta. With this in mind I thought I’d extend yesterdays offer until midnight tonight. So go sign up before your forget… 

The Mighty CV beta subscriber list currently stands at a grand total of 41 and so my quest continues. It’s such a small number, but already I’ve learned a lot just getting this many people to pay attention to Mighty CV. It’s my first ever startup and I’m already bracing myself for a bumpy ride. I’m making lots of notes as I go and probably lots of mistakes. I plan to post what I learn here on this blog as an aide-mémoire for myself, I also hope that others might find at least some of what I write here and the lessons I learn useful too.

I’ll write a more structured post soon but in the meantime here are some things I’ve noticed and services I’ve used to get things rolling:

• Heroku rocks!
• Optimizely is great and makes A/B split testing a dream.
• Go Squared is addicitive (Bad dog! Stop staring at that thing! Hit yourself on the nose with a newspaper and get back to work)
• Posting relevant comments on popular HN news stories that back link to your service feels a bit spammy but people don’t seem to mind. Thanks for the upvotes!
• Giving your product away for free for a limited time gets attention. Duh!
• Typekit flickers irritatingly before the fonts load. Otherwise great though.
• GSD with a few modifications seems to be working for me. (I dream of a day when I don’t procrastinate so much - GSD is helping)
• I’m starting to dream about this stuff and I got to the pub two hours late last night because I was still furiously coding. Sorry guys!

Anyway I’ve decided to extend the free offer until midnight tonight and so if anyone likes the look of Mighty CV and wants to help me get to 1000 beta subscribers then you’d make me a very happy little quester.