Show HN: Crowd² - A viral marketing campaign creator I wrote in 72 hours

Most sites will have some good choices of illustrations. It doesn't have to be anything special. I really think you could get away with glorified stick figures and still make a great video.

The script and storyline is important. The big takeaway that I've gotten so far has been to make it "story-based". So instead of just a screencast saying "Crowd2 helps you create a marketing campaign to advertise your products", try, "Kevin is looking for ways to tell people about his new CD release..."

That's a great looking product for such a short time. I really like the looks of the video, but for me it was a bit light on information. You are explaining how the viral effect works, but I also want to know how the campaign creator works. Will I get a code snippet I have to integrate into my page? Do I have to host anything myself? It looks like the only way to find out is to create a campaign.

Out of curiosity, did you create this in 72 hours straight, i.e. a long weekend, or stretched out over several evenings?

I consult a niche daily deal site that implemented something similar.

In that case, it had a standard "email subscribe" nag screen (think Groupon or Living Social). There was a "No Thanks" link at the bottom. Of course most people clicked that.

We decided to give them a Like button option, too. We made the lightbox modal, and required that they either "Like" or fill-in their email address.

An email address would suppress the nag screen forever (cookie based version of 'forever', of course). A Like would suppress it for, I think, 1 week.

After a week, they'd have the same screen, but then a Tweet button.

We used the AddThis API, made it easy, we attached an OnSuccess callback to the LikeButton.

We ran 2 tests, twice. The first split the old version to the new version with the Share option. We found the Share option decreased subscribers, increased Likes, and decreased "No Thanks" clicks.

Then we ran a test between that Share version, and a version where we eliminated the "No Thanks" link. It increased both subscriptions AND like's significantly. Numbers are to this day somewhere like ~10% increase in subscriptions, and a substantial increase in likes. Sales were not immediately impacted -- and they're pretty confident in increased sales due to the increased value of their list and fan page.

We did end up doing one more tweak -- I suppose we added a door to the Share Wall. We added a 25 second SetTimeout that fades-in the "No Thanks" link. If they're in the middle of typing their email address or signing-into facebook or whatever, the set-timeout just resets itself. We don't want to cannibalize that social activity if they're in the middle of it. But there was just worry about AddThis or the Like button not working properly, etc. We wanted to give them another way at the content.

Thanks. I'll probably make some updates to the video and explain some things differently. I'm going to get somebody to do the voiceover next time, too. I think that will help with the quality.

Thursday early morning I started programming. Working prototype by Thursday afternoon. Spent then next couple days polishing it. Finished it Saturday night. Then I just spent Sunday doing design, copywriting, and video production.

here's the issue: to checkout crowd2 you need to share it on your social network. unless you have a dummy social network that you use for SPAM, you're going to share it to your friends.

but hey, I don't know if I wanna share it yet. i wanna test it first. And, crowd2 is share first, test second. And that's just wrong.

It's easy to make the parallel to another form of spam, as you'd have to have a spam account to view it, as stated in my first paragraph.