How I got started with coverletter.me

Around Christmas 2022, I had just moved myself and my family across the globe, from Denmark to Australia, and I was about to be in-between jobs. Turns out it’s hard to work for a company in Denmark while living in Australia.

Having been self-employed for the past 6 and gotten my job before that through references, it had been about a while since I last had to write a job application, so I was honestly a little rusty.

Writing job applications is a tedious task: You have to write a new one for each job, and if you want it to stand out you have to tailor it to the job description. It’s a lot of work, and it’s hard to stay motivated.

My set-up was to look for interesting positions on LinkedIn and apply for roughly 10 positions each week. I had set my chances of getting an offer from a job I applied for to 5%, so if I could write 10 applications each week, I should expect to get 2 offers from a month’s worth of applications.

Lacking a useful to track my applications, I kept a Hubspot account with a list of the jobs I had applied for since I could log all the relevant information there including email dialogues and notes. For applications, I was applying for various roles in tech from which I had experience in such as software engineering, product management, and data science. I kept a number of versions of my resume tailored to each type of role, and then a cover letter template with highlighted placeholders for the company name, role, and a few other things.

At the same time, OpenAI had just ushered us into the future by unveiling ChatGPT about a month earlier, and I had been playing around with it since the early release and was blown away by the quality of the text it could generate.

I wasn’t in a place to consider starting a new business, but I was tired of writing job applications and interested in automating that process away. I was also curious how fast I could launch a product if I wanted to, so I decided to try and build a tool that could generate my cover letters for me. It would take a job description, a few noteworthy things about myself and then combine it into a cover letter for my applications.

After a day’s worth of work I managed to launch the app and get it to a point where I could use it for my own job applications. The app fit the criteria I outlined for myself in my previous post about pursuing a business idea pretty well, so thinking that it couldn’t hurt, I posted it to my social media and forgot about it.

Getting to today

I didn’t want to get my hopes up in terms of traffic, having previously suffered at the hands of the “build it and they will come” fallacy. But contrary to my expectations, Reddit seemed to have taken note and it had started getting a few users each day. So much so, that I was surprised to see that by February it was getting several hundred visitors each week and costing me noticeable money in OpenAI credits!

Given this early interest, I was excited to invest some more time into it and see if I could grow it further. It’s hard to explain the feeling you get when you see other people using something you’ve built and coming back for more.

At the same time, I have two small kids and I just started a new job in February (the app obviously worked! *brushes dust off my shoulder*), so finding time to work on it has been difficult.

I have been able to find a few hours a week in the evening, though, where I’ve mainly added usability tweaks and posting about it on Reddit. And I am proud to say that now I am actually getting around 1,000 visitors each month! It really makes it so much easier to build a good product when you work on something that you can use yourself (for any of my colleagues reading along: I don’t use it anymore! 😬).

Just to make sure that I don’t develop it into a hole, I have also been trying to solicit feedback from my users. My latest attempt, which I feel is working quite well, is a little “rate me” pop-up that comes up after you’ve generated a cover letter. If you rate it, it also asks for feedback.

I’ve gotten a few feature requests so far, but the best feedback has honestly just been to hear that people are excited to use it and that it’s helping them. Comments like “Amazing”, “Great app”, “I love this app!” really make my day. And the ones that aren’t as kind help guide it in the right direction.

My goal is to get it to a 90% satisfaction rating now, and then I will start expanding in functionality to help even more with the job application process. A cover letter is just one small part of it, so I have a few ideas for what to build next.