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Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day

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Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day

#31

Post by rabble »

cookiecaper wrote: post #22
romeda wrote: post #3

This is remarkable, even to me. The main point: if you're doing a startup, things take a long time. Longer than you'd expect. And overnight success is anything but.

Personally 160 users sounds like a lot to me. None of the unfunded services I've bootstrapped had reached that.

Mind you, these aren't paying clients or anything, just a 160 twitter accounts. At the time you had to have it created FROM a mobile phone, so the onboarding process was clunky. We were showing it to our friends, tell them how cool it was. A team of 10, with 3 months to pressure their friends and family in to using the service, got 160 users.

Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day

#32

Post by rabble »

budu3 wrote: post #18

Interesting how he signs of with "keep twttring". I that email was written today it would have been "keep tweeting".

Nobody liked the word tweet. It was a term created by the user community, and only slowly accepted by the team.

Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day

#33

Post by sheriff »

blhack wrote: post #15

Does anybody have any information about the types of things that twitter did at first to market themselves? This is a problem for me doing thingist ( http://thingist.com )... the people who have found and signed up for it seem to have really liked it, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to get more of those people. (And I am an admittedly horrible marketing person)

Currently you're in a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, where new visitors probably need to see more fresh content to get interested, but your content only comes from having lots of visitors. If you can bootstrap the content, you may find that user acquisition gets easier.

It seems a little bit like you're trying to create a more structured version of what people are already doing on Twitter with many of the trending hashtags. (e.g. today's #failedmcdonaldsproducts[1] or #100factsaboutme[2]) Rather than fight the momentum Twitter already has there, perhaps you could take advantage of the Twitter API to automatically pull these trending topics in as Thingist Lists. When a new list is auto-created from a trending topic, you can automatically tweet out a link to the Thingist list with the same hashtag, which will get you exposure among people following that term.

The hard part then is making sure Thingist provides a more compelling experience than Twitter for browsing these sets of things. I'm not sure if you're there yet, but there is definitely an opportunity to do something better than search-by-hashtag. If you do pull this off, you'll have plenty of fresh content to keep new users engaged until they start creating lists right on Thingist.

[1] http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23failedmcdonaldsproducts

[2] http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23100factsaboutme

Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day

#34

Post by d_r »

romeda wrote: post #3

This is remarkable, even to me. The main point: if you're doing a startup, things take a long time. Longer than you'd expect. And overnight success is anything but.

"Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success." -Biz Stone (co-founder of Twitter)

http://www.bizstone.com/2010/09/timing-lessons.html

Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day

#35

Post by saranagati »

blhack wrote: post #27
makeee wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were you I'd add a facebook like button to each thing and allow people to create lists of things they love just by clicking the facebook like button (no registration required, just save their list to a cookie). Then if they signup they can save their list. This makes it easy for users to jump right it in, and may bring in a lot of traffic from facebook. Of course, some users may not want to share each thing they…

There are like buttons on the item pages... (like here: http://thingist.com/t/item/4720/ ) I tried putting them in the feed, but they looked really out of place (it made things look really really cluttered) I really like the idea of [optionally] importing facebook likes... Hmm (As a sidenote: can I just point out that facebook's API is freaking awesome ?)

> (As a sidenote: can I just point out that facebook's API is freaking awesome?)

No you may not. Facebooks API is horrible. I was just implementing the like buttons on my site and realized that they have to be iframes (even the FBXML or whatever its called creates iframes). This turns out a bit ridiculous on pages such as yours (if you put them on the feed page) and mine where you Twitter on the other hand allows you to just gives you a URL which points users to a link to share the page.

Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day

#36

Post by blhack »

saranagati wrote: post #35
blhack wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are like buttons on the item pages... (like here: http://thingist.com/t/item/4720/ ) I tried putting them in the feed, but they looked really out of place (it made things look really really cluttered) I really like the idea of [optionally] importing facebook likes... Hmm (As a sidenote: can I just point out that facebook's API is freaking awesome ?)

> (As a sidenote: can I just point out that facebook's API is freaking awesome?) No you may not. Facebooks API is horrible. I was just implementing the like buttons on my site and realized that they have to be iframes (even the FBXML or whatever its called creates iframes). This turns out a bit ridiculous on pages such as yours (if you put them on the feed page) and mine where you Twitter on the other hand allows you…

Well, you could write your own, but you'd have to have users authenticate the application. In my opinion, this isn't much different than twitter, since both actions would require two clicks:

facebook: click your custom widget -> facebook prompt -> perform action

twitter: click your custom widget -> twitter prompt -> perform action

(Or just do like I do, and change the size of the iframe to 450x20)

Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day

#39

Post by rabble »

technomancy wrote: post #37
amitparikh wrote: post #9

I'll be the first to say... Thank you for putting the vowels back in your name. "Twttr" looks horrible.

They probably couldn't afford twitter.com back in the day.

Ev had a bundle of pre-IPO google stock, so he could afford it. Also Odeo stil had cash in the bank, but he didn't want to buy the vowels until he was sure there was something to the idea.

Obvious was supposed to be a company which hacked out many ideas, a kind of incubator. The problem was one of the first batches of ideas turned in to a major run away success.

Re: Internal status email: Twitter at 3 months old. 160 Users & 100 Tweets per day

#40

Post by rabble »

c2 wrote: post #38

"Older" hackers take note: Biz Stone, Evan Williams: 30+ founders club. They were both over thirty when twitter started.

Ev started his first company when he was a teen, and kept starting them over and over again. Biz had founded Xanga, many years before. Sure, they were over 30, i think Jack and Noah were too, when twitter got started. All of them had started earlier companies in their teen's and 20's.
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