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How We Unexpectedly Got 60K Users in 60 Hours (2012)

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31–40 of 61 posts

Re: How We Unexpectedly Got 60K Users in 60 Hours (2012)

#31
post #7

Numbers of registrations is a vanity metric. How many used the core product? How many retained? How many converted to paying? How many told their friends?

That's a very good question. We're not a social network or a game, so most people come to us to solve a specific problem: they don't like their Google results. We have a free product because we realize many people simply want to be more visible, they want to make sure their portfolio or linkedin profile actually shows up. Other people have more to promote or are trying to bury something embarrassing. These are the people who use the product more and pay for premium.

To answer your questions

"How many converted to paying" --about 3% converted to paying, which is slightly lower then our normal traffic (4-5%). A lot of the "non-converts" were part of the foreign traffic we eventually moved to a wait-list until we can enter those markets with a more strategic plan

"How many retained" --This is an interesting question. Most people used the product, 3% paid. Remember, our product is meant to be free, so many people do some upfront work and then just check their email progress reports to make sure everything is still OK. Our email open rates have never dropped below 60%, so many people are retained in the sense that they check those emails. We'll have people who signed up during that surge that will pay us for the first time today based off one of those emails

"How many told their friends"

About 75% of users tell somebody else. This is based on a user survey. The problem is, almost all of them tell people in person. They tell them over dinner, or at an event when someone mentions their Google results. We haven't figured out a way to capture that same rate through online vehicles.

Re: How We Unexpectedly Got 60K Users in 60 Hours (2012)

#32
post #19

I noticed the 'do things that don't scale' actions like delivering a trophy with cookies to the 10k user or writing personalized emails to every new customer.

Yes within the company we've adopted a motto "customer service is the most underrated marketing channel". I think this is what has driven most of our steady growth which comes through word of mouth

Re: How We Unexpectedly Got 60K Users in 60 Hours (2012)

#33
post #12

There's a lot of good information the slides, but for the quick and dirty: 1. They found one feature that a lot of people enjoyed (some would call this a MVP) and lots of people shared it 2. Mashable picked up on it and then other publications did. 3. Massive growth. The main takeaway that I always tell startup people: 1. Marketing works, don't neglect it. (in this case PR worked extremely well) 2. Don't do marketing…

Thanks for summarizing.

The content would be a great deal more consumable (and sharable) in a blog post that didn't require 75 clicks to view all of the content.

Re: How We Unexpectedly Got 60K Users in 60 Hours (2012)

#35
post #8

So browsing nginx logs for my vanity domain and running whois queries for the IPs at 3am is not nearly as weird as I thought.

On that note, how exactly are they reaching conclusions on where Googlers who are Googling you actually work? (i.e. their actual company name, not just the physical location their IP address maps to).

There are actually a lot of different databases that match IP addresses to companies, university's etc. For example, Max Mind GEOIP has some of that info. The trick was just compiling those different sources into a more reliable custom database. We still have a lot of work to do to continue to improve that database

Re: How We Unexpectedly Got 60K Users in 60 Hours (2012)

#37
post #33
post #12

There's a lot of good information the slides, but for the quick and dirty: 1. They found one feature that a lot of people enjoyed (some would call this a MVP) and lots of people shared it 2. Mashable picked up on it and then other publications did. 3. Massive growth. The main takeaway that I always tell startup people: 1. Marketing works, don't neglect it. (in this case PR worked extremely well) 2. Don't do marketing…

Thanks for summarizing. The content would be a great deal more consumable (and sharable) in a blog post that didn't require 75 clicks to view all of the content.

I originally wrote a post on my personal blog about this. Let me know if you find it helpful :)

http://www.patrickambron.me/we-unexpectedly-got-60k-users-in...

Re: How We Unexpectedly Got 60K Users in 60 Hours (2012)

#38
Hi Guys,

My name is Patrick, I'm the CoFounder of BrandYourself and I'm the one who made this presentation. I read HackerNews everyday, and was literally knocked off my chair when I saw my own presentation on the front page. Thank you

I've gotten some great feedback. Some of you have asked some great questions so I'm going through now to answer as many of them as possible.

In the meantime, some of you mentioned this would be more consumable in a blog post. Here's a link to the original blog post I wrote about this--it actually includes a lot more data

http://www.patrickambron.me/we-unexpectedly-got-60k-users-in...

Re: How We Unexpectedly Got 60K Users in 60 Hours (2012)

#40
post #6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say the same. How we got 60k users in 60 hours: make something useful that people really want.

> How we got 60k users in 60 hours: make something useful that people really want. And tell them about it in a way that they understand

I think this was the key takeaway. Making a product people want is the first step. The second step is boiling it down into a message people quickly understand. If we described our product as "DIY SEO tools to improve your personal SERPS" people would quickly overlook it. However, by emphasizing the story/benefits, people see how it relates to their life. "Improve what shows up when employers, clients or even dates Google your name". That's way easier to understand
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