Low-Code Founders: Louis Le Mercier, founder of CV Swap and “Être étudiant”
By: Melanie Bialgues
Tags: No Code, Low Code, Entreprenuership, Cv, Founders

Low-Code Founders: Louis Le Mercier, founder of CV Swap and “Être étudiant”

Inside the mind of an entrepreneur: our founder of the week tells about the company he created around the Facebook page “Être étudiant” with his co-associate and the recent release of their online resume solution.

What led you to entrepreneurship?

“I was brought to it by meeting my friend and future co-associate Fabien Feuillard during our business school studies. We both had already made videos on Dailymotion that had worked well and wanted to realize news projects.

Our first project was a website called “Student Box” made on Wordpress to list the best websites and applications for students. Since we didn’t have a lot of money to put into advertising and promotion, it wasn’t very well known and we didn’t have a big flow of visitors. To change this, we created a Facebook page with a name that we wanted to be less commercial than Student Box: “Être Etudiant” (Being a Student). This allowed us to directly target and identify the audience we were addressing. It was an immediate hit: in two weeks, 20,000 people subscribed to the page and almost as many visited our website.

Beyond the website, what thrilled us the most was to grow a community around this Facebook page, so we decided to close the website to focus on “Être étudiant” in parallel with our studies.To feed it in publication, we started to create daily memes, small texts etc. to which the students could identify themselves through the hardships they were going through.

At the time, there weren’t many people offering this kind on content on student life in French. Our initial goal was to propose an alternative content to the traditional and serious media such as the “L’Etudiant” (The Student), in which we do not identify ourselves.

We started to be contacted by several brands to promote them so we set up this business model in which we were making videos about tips or interviews to promote brands with the touch of “Être Etudiant”. At the end of our studies, we were able to raise funds and recruit new members to expand our skills. Today, we work with Amazon, JustEat, La Fnac and startups like “Bob le mini lave-vaisselle” (Bob the tiny dishwasher), a French startup that decided to break the dishwasher codes to make it more practical and accessible for students who are struggling with their dirty dishes.

What motivated you to launch CV Swap?

While we were doing B2B with brand content (with all the advantages and constraints that this implies), we wanted to diversify our business model.

We were aware that we had a great audience, to whom we wanted to bring convenient services while allowing us to develop the media. It had to be something that was automated, that allowed us to make a regular income without having to spend a lot of time on it apart from the after-sales service.

After talking about the problems that the students encountered in everyday life, we realized that they had a lot of difficulties in creating a CV (what to put in it, how to make it attractive, etc.). Creating a CV application naturally came to us, since it seemed complementary and didn’t require us to invest a lot of time.

Can you present us CV Swap ?

CV Swap is an intuitive platform that allows you to build a design and optimized job search resume in 10 minutes.

Recruiters only spend a few seconds reading a resume, so the first impression has to be the good one. Having a visually optimized CV has a significant impact on the candidate pre-screening process when the recruiter has more than 200 of these to read.

The problem is that the majority of existing solutions are either too complex, not elaborate enough or too expensive. We believe that simply not being able to use or afford an online resume solution should not disadvantage the candidate. So the aim was to implement an effective solution that anyone could use and afford.

In 2021, the CV Swap application is expected to grow in terms of audiences, traffic and available templates. We believe this will be feasible thanks to Bubble, which makes maintaining the application simple and fast.

What challenges did you meet?

I was afraid that this kind of solution would not interest our audience of students, who don’t have much money. Even though our first offer starts at €2.99 for 7 days access to CV Swap’s premium features, it’s already a lot for some people.

Another concern was the security aspect of the platform, as there is a lot of data collected (academic background, identities etc.). We gathered a lot of information about user data management (RGPD etc.) and I was able to easily contact Bubble who sent me all the documents I needed to reassure me.

How went the development of the application?

I already had some bases in Python and JavaScript as I was interested in development, but I was aware of the fact that it took a lot of learning time to feel comfortable with it. With my basics, I would have been unable to do the CV Swap MVP without it taking me months. However, they served me well when I started to learn to use Bubble.

During the containment last March, I decided to allocate 2 hours per day to a Udemy training to learn how to use Bubble. I quickly found its operation and possibilities very interesting. After a week, I was able to start testing a basic CV Swap MVP to see if Bubble allowed me to do it entirely without using code.

Since our student audience consults our posts 80% on the phone, we wanted the application to be very responsive on mobile. It’s a very complicated aspect to set up without having the necessary good practices. There was also another challenging part, which was to integrate the APIs for the necessary options (such as exporting the CV in pdf). As soon as you have to use a bit of code, it’s much more complex.

The tool makes it possible to make more complex products than simple showcase sites, so there is a certain learning curve, but you can do a lot of things with it if you invest seriously.

In the end, we developed CV Swap in 2–3 months and were able to have a solid prototype that we tested with friends, family and acquaintances who were looking for an internship.

We were able to launch CV Swap for the September back-to-school season. Obviously, we could have done it faster if we had worked on it full time. What’s certain is that it would have taken much more time with a traditional development tool. I’m delighted to have discovered Bubble.

What advice do you give to people who have an entrepreneurial project but are afraid to take the plunge?

First of all, I would say that the most important thing is to persevere. There are often hardships, problems and difficult moments. But if we choose a project that motivates us on a daily basis, we can overcome these difficulties and keep our spirits up more easily. That’s why it’s important to choose your project carefully and to be able to identify with your target.

Otherwise it’s a bit cliché, but it’s particularly true: do not be afraid of making mistakes. It’s the same as when you start a new video game: there is a learning curve but you always end up being more comfortable and doing what you wanted.

It’s important to surround yourself with the right people, both professionally and personally. If you have a great team on the professional side but your personal life is complicated, it’s difficult to keep your motivation and to be able to lead your team and make the right choices.

It is important to be very careful during the recruitment phase and to be as transparent as possible with future candidates, so that they do not imagine things and are not disappointed afterwards. Don’t try to sell them too much of the dream and explain to them the vision of your project, that it can take time and that they will not be traditional employees because entrepreneurship is also a human adventure. You have to create a bond of trust and make your corporate culture reflect on these people to be sure that this is what they need.

Finally, I would say that you should not compare your entrepreneurial experience with what you see on Instagram or LinkedIn: the kind of people who are always travelling, who are very business -and performance- oriented, always seem to have the best ways of doing things and make us feel guilty. It’s just Vanity Content and we shouldn’t stop at that or waste time on it. The most important thing is to find interesting, relevant and caring people to live this adventure with. We are humans, we have to do things right, but some ways of doing things are not adapted to everyone. Everyone has their own way of functioning”.