A lot of people personally reach out to me, asking how Loopcv started, how the product used to be in the early days, and why did I choose building this business
In this post, I explain the background story behind Loopcv, how all started, how we grew the product and what the future looks like for us
Background
I was pursuing my master thesis at IMEC in Belgium. I had 3 months to go, and after that I would have to find a job. While doing research for more than 10 hours per day, finding the time and the courage to search online, apply, send emails to companies was difficult.
This is where I realised that a tool that automates this process did not exist, and thus I had to build my own tool in order to find a job without requiring to spend hours of searching. And this is where all started...
The starting point
The first thing was to start playing around with some scripts (you know, code to test if the idea was possible).
I created some scripts that were able to collect jobs from Linkedin, and then send automated emails using Sendgrid. While doing it I realised that companies started to reply in my emails, requesting interviews.
This is how Loopcv started.
Building the first version of the product
After spending a couple of weeks playing around with scripts, tools and emails to learn and see how the whole process works, I started crafting the first version of the Loopcv dashboard. It was be very simple allowing you to do only the following thins in the early days:
1) Uploading your cv
2) Add a job title and a location
3) Create the text of the email to be sent
4) Click start (this would schedule a cron job for this job search)
Building the first version of the frontend was a great experience. I started collecting feedback from communities and friends in order to shape the product and make it great
The launch
To test the product, while building some very simple scripts to test the waters, I created a very simple landing page and started doing some posts on Reddit
The results were just amazing! More and more people started replying, adding comments, questions and a lot of them started signup for the future product!
The first signups were the most amazing experience ever! I built a bot in the backend that would sent a very simple email to me to keep track of the new signups and reach out to every single subscriber, asking questions and learning more about them and the reason they would use a product like this.
The great demand was the reason I realised that there are a lot more people like me that didn't have time to search for jobs online, or they didn't know how to do it properly. So I decided to create a team to start building the first MVP
The team
Finding a team to create a new product is not the easiest part. You have to find people you know, you trust and that have the skillset to build and scale a product like this.
I started using Linkedin, facebook, conferences and started talking about the vision of Loopcv and what kind of people I was looking to find.
This is how the Team of Loopcv started and at the moment we are 6 people working in the product, marketing and parternships of Loopcv!
The future
The last 6 months, we have been working improving the product, collecting feedback from our users, and learn a lot about the industry and the process of finding a job in different places of the world
Through the process of building Loopcv, we have been participating in a lot of different accelerators, learning great insights about successful online businesses and shaping the next steps of our product.
Our roadmap contains A LOT of great features, tactics and tests that we would like to do. This will allow us spreading the word about Loopcv, enable more users to learn what an "automated job search" really means, and make sure that more and more people land interviews while spending time learning new things instead of filling job application forms