After graduating from college, I went to work for one of the world’s largest professional services firms as a management consultant. During the recruitment process, I was pitched on getting a wide breadth of experience in various industries, regular travel, and ample leadership development opportunities. What I found instead was a lackluster culture, a lifestyle that was not aligned with my vision for my life, and a lack of opportunity to get breadth of experience across industries.
I founded Living for Monday in August 2011 in response to that experience with the goal of helping college students and recent graduates find and excel in jobs that matter. We had some great successes over the course of three years before I decided to shut down the company in April 2014.
Launch
Living for Monday launched on the basis of one key hypothesis: university career centers are largely failing college students in the services, mentoring, and job opportunities they provide. We set out to solve that problem by writing in-depth articles to help college students and young professionals conduct a self-directed career search and become a top performer once you land the job.
We also created a signature product, which we branded as Career Kickstarter. It was an comprehensive 12 week career search program. The first 6 weeks were dedicated to developing self awareness and then applying the learning to develop an ideal job description. The second half of the curriculum focused on the more tactical aspects of a career search, including research, resumes, cover letters, networking, interviewing, and negotiating job offers. It remains one of the most in depth and practical products of its kind.
Website Design: LivingforMonday.com
We worked with a design firm to launch the first professionally built version of LivingforMonday.com, which you can see below through a series of screenshots showing the homepage, blog homepage, and single post templates for the site.
The homepage above focused on building an email list for the site, introduced first time visitors to our team, signature product, and email optin offer, and built social proof through quotes from well known career and entrepreneurship bloggers.
The blog homepage above featured a category slider, three recent blog posts, and a sidebar built to capture email subscribers, generate leads for our signature product, and direct readers to popular content around the site.
The blog post template above featured the same sidebar as the blog homepage. It was built to encourage the reader to enjoy the current article and continue browsing the site afterwards.
Team
Throughout the three year operations of the company, various interns, employees, and advisors were essential to our growth, success, and learning. They included:
Trey Sinyard
Intern, August 2011 – 2012
Nijil Kuruvilla
Intern, January – May 2013
Neerav Maniklal
Intern, January – May 2013
Jessie Lian
Intern, January – May 2013
Nikita Desai
Intern, January – May 2013
Caroline McKinley
Intern, January – May 2013
Nick Toomey
Director of Marketing, March 2012 – May 2013
Ilya Gokhman
Advisor, 2013
Dale Gauthreaux
Advisor, August 2011 – April 2014
Josh Winkles
Director of Operations, May 2013 – April 2014
Results
During 2013, our last full year of operations, we had a very good year when it comes to generating website traffic, building an email list, and promoting our content. Some of our results for 2013 include:
- Overall, we had 158,420 visits and 221,412 pageviews by 135,426 people at LivingforMonday.com.
- Of the 135,000+ people who visited Livingformonday.com in 2013, 61% were Millennials, which is the audience we targeted with our content.
- On our best traffic day (the big spike in the graph), we had 10,658 visitors to the site thanks to the Hacker News crowd latching on to How to Accept and Decline Job Offers.
- We recorded and published 37 episodes of The Living for Monday Show, earning 5,169 downloads in 2013.
- We earned $10,000 in 2013 revenue.
- Consulted with a local insurance agency to produce three consecutive months of the highest growth rates in five years. We inserted new sales, operations, and coaching practices to help the team become more efficient and motivated. The project gained the agency recognition across the region for their growth.
- Consulted with a local ballroom dance dress maker to create all new internal operations and customer relationship management processes. We built the entire system on Podio and effectively trained the staff to take advantage of the new system to produce improved efficiency, inventory tracking, and employee engagement.
- Our work allowed us to raise $100,000+ in angel investment funding for ongoing operations.
- Our work at Living for Monday helped me earn a spot working for Seth Godin on the Krypton team.
- Our work also helped me earn election to the Atlanta Global Shapers, an offshoot of the World Economic Forum.
- Our work helped me land a spot on the speaking roster at TEDxUGA 2014, where I used the summation of our writing and research at Living for Monday to deliver a talk entitled, “Thank Goodness It’s Monday.”
- Most importantly, we learned invaluable lessons that have allowed me to be more effective as an entrepreneur, business coach, and professional.
Closing Down
We created a brand and blog that resonated deeply with an audience of young professionals who want to make an impact through their work everyday. I’m proud of the results we achieved and all that we learned in operating a company over the course of three years.
In 2014, we pivoted to focus exclusively on a local Atlanta young professional audience. We came to a mutual agreement with our investor that the likely financial return of the company did not warrant continued investment in our operations. Based on this assessment, we shut the company and website down and declared the project a smashing success.