Was getting on TechCrunch seriously their only marketing strategy?
That shouldn't even be a part of your marketing strategy.
The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunched
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunched
#22I absolutely know how this feels.
When we announced our game we managed to get articles on a bunch of top tier gaming media. IGN, PC Gamer, G4TV, and a whole host of smaller sites.
And here is what it all amounted to: http://i.imgur.com/IqBcy.png
Sad isn't it.
Each time you get a new article you get a spike, and then a downturn, but each one leaves your baseline higher. Now we get many times the traffic we got in a spike at announcement every day.
Re: The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunched
#23I clicked on the website, yipit. didn't make it any further then the first screen. The problem is you want a lot of work and personal info from me up front. I have no idea who you are, but you expect me to give you my email right away? Nope sorry I don't trust you. This is kind of like going to a restaurant you've never heard about, that has no yelp reviews, but is just a giant door. Then before you walk in a guy in…
I figured I'd check out the website too. I click on 'Get started - it's free!' and was also instantly put off by having to enter my email. I enter a fake to see whether it'd be worth it... "20% complete! Tell us which emails you'd like to receive?" 20% complete?! I don't want to receive ANY emails! I just want to see the product.
After deciding to abandon the process, I went back to the home page, which then redirected me to http://yipit.com/boston/categories/dining-nightlife/ ! This should be amongst the first things a user sees! This is what I was looking for!
Re: The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunched
#24I think people are burned out on daily deal sites and deal aggregators. I checked out your product and while it seems to be executed well, it didn't offer me a compelling reason to come back.
Re: The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunched
#25I absolutely know how this feels. When we announced our game we managed to get articles on a bunch of top tier gaming media. IGN, PC Gamer, G4TV, and a whole host of smaller sites. And here is what it all amounted to: http://i.imgur.com/IqBcy.png Sad isn't it. Each time you get a new article you get a spike, and then a downturn, but each one leaves your baseline higher. Now we get many times the traffic we got in a s…
Each time you get a new article you get a spike, and then
a downturn, but each one leaves your baseline higher. Now
we get many times the traffic we got in a spike at
announcement every day.
Why is the baseline higher? Is it link juice from SEO? Is it some mysterious equilibrium of new users and returning users but more of them find you through the article? Is it simply that X out of 1,000,000 people have heard of you, and X gets incremented by a small amount and therefore your daily base traffic increases?
To be honest our traffic has been very predictable, both in the weekly steady state and the year-over-year growth. I'm shocked the daily variance of visits isn't a lot more.
Re: The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunched
#26These posts make me want to write a Startup FAQ: Q: How do I get on Techcrunch: A: Ignore Techcrunch. Don't waste brain cycles on them. If they cover you on their own, great. It almost certainly won't do anything to improve your odds of success, but it probably can't hurt. A better question to ask is: how do I design and implement the right marketing strategy for my startup?
I'd say the takeway from yipit is that they need to build a better product. If the engagement is that low after receiving 8k+ hits (resulting in 3 returning users), then it's probably not the right time to work on a marketing strategy. you need to go all the way back and work on the fundamentals of your product. 0.03% (as well as the 1.5% for users who successfully signed up) is an abysmal rate for returning users -…
Really depends on who your audience is. If the Techcrunch readership isn't your audience, those conversion rates aren't necessarily indicative of anything.
Re: The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunched
#27These posts make me want to write a Startup FAQ: Q: How do I get on Techcrunch: A: Ignore Techcrunch. Don't waste brain cycles on them. If they cover you on their own, great. It almost certainly won't do anything to improve your odds of success, but it probably can't hurt. A better question to ask is: how do I design and implement the right marketing strategy for my startup?
Please do, I'd love to read it. Your blog is the most honest account of entrepreneurship I've seen. ("Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit and Maybe Fun" was one of my favorite startup reads ever.) At a previous startup I cofounded, we had an incredible launch. TechCrunch, NYTimes (online and print), Gizmodo, etc. -- it was incredible! We still pivoted a few months later. If anything, the press helped us justify hold…
He has already written the startup FAQ. It has one question :)
Re: The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunched
#28>Boom. A tweet every 5 minutes. People are re-tweeting the TechCrunch article covering your startup’s launch. This is something I don't "get" about Twitter or the people who seem to care about it. There's an awful lot of tweeting and re-tweeting of completely generic "news" like a new post on Techcrunch with nothing added in the way of context or even opinion. It's pure noise. Using the social buttons as an indicator…
There are so many accounts / bots on Twitter that just auto-tweet anything from TC (and virtually every reputable news site), it's hard to take Twitter count as anything of value the day of a press release as there will be a lot of meaningless noise.
Re: The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunched
#29These posts make me want to write a Startup FAQ: Q: How do I get on Techcrunch: A: Ignore Techcrunch. Don't waste brain cycles on them. If they cover you on their own, great. It almost certainly won't do anything to improve your odds of success, but it probably can't hurt. A better question to ask is: how do I design and implement the right marketing strategy for my startup?
I think you're getting the wrong point. TechCrunch is not a good source for acquiring non-technical users. However it can be good for getting your name out to investors (being mentioned in TechCrunch is better then never being mentioned in TechCrunch), SEO, and general brand recognition. So yes, don't try to get on TechCrunch to grow your users, but it's not a bad part of a larger media strategy.
Re: The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunched
#30Tech press comes in handy for biz dev, marketing, and fundraising purposes: You can send the article to potential partners and it makes you look legit. Side-note: This article is on the front page of HN now (congrats to the author, well played!) but there's no link to the company or TC article in the blog, that I can see.
Link to the company looks less relevant since the article says it is loosely based on something that happens years ago.
There's a link to the company under the author's name on the top right, though. :)