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

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

#41

Post by patrickambron »

sejje wrote: post #23
300 wrote: post #14

It's interesting to see. If nothing more, I at least learned(again) that powerful marketing is the key for successful product/service - front page on HN/TechCrunch/Mashable/etc is definitely something that every startup should focus on in the beginning.

I absolutely disagree with your last statement. Many niche startups--those without mass appeal--have no reason to focus on TechCrunch. There may be some all-important blog in their field, though. Think Patio11 focused on getting BCC on the front page of Mashable? I highly doubt it.

I think it depends on your business model and audience. As a b2c product, any press is good obviously. However, I think it's more important to understand who your audience is and how to relay your story to them in a way that's digestible and understandable.

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

#42

Post by patrickambron »

pdog wrote: post #39

A signup conversion rate of 30+% from news articles on Mashable , Huffington Post , Yahoo! News , social sharing, and direct and search traffic is just incredible. Is that typical for this type of service?

Basically anything around 8% is considered very good. We spent ALOT of time optimizing our sign up flow. We did hundreds of usability tests. I think the key was making it clear what the product would do and why they needed to complete each step. We tweaked language until nobody in a usability test seemed confuse. We removed any step that people didn't actually need.

We continue to focus on this. Even as we've grown we've maintained a free sign up rate of 15%

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

#43

Post by asdf333 »

danso wrote: post #21

The pivotal moment that the OP talks about is being covered by Mashable, here: http://mashable.com/2012/05/01/brandyourself-google/ The claim that the service can tell you who Googled you is partially true...if someone Googles you and if they happen to click through to your BrandYourself page, then BrandYourself can guess the IP against a list of publicly known servers. This is a useful service for those who can't se…

where is this 'list of publicly known servers'?

do you mean just doing a reverse ip lookup? because often the ip address of the server is different than the ip address used by the business when people are browsing.

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

#44

Post by whitlock »

patrickambron wrote: post #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…

Patrick,

I heard Pete's story on NPR a while back and how it helped your company grow. It stuck out since when the reporter tried to verify the story they found no results. The reporter comes short of accusing you or your co-founder of telling a fake story to sell a product. I'd like to hear you or Pete's take on this story (URL below).

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/05/29/187080...

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

#45

Post by patio11 »

sejje wrote: post #23
300 wrote: post #14

It's interesting to see. If nothing more, I at least learned(again) that powerful marketing is the key for successful product/service - front page on HN/TechCrunch/Mashable/etc is definitely something that every startup should focus on in the beginning.

I absolutely disagree with your last statement. Many niche startups--those without mass appeal--have no reason to focus on TechCrunch. There may be some all-important blog in their field, though. Think Patio11 focused on getting BCC on the front page of Mashable? I highly doubt it.

I'm pretty sure that time the Jane Austen Society called for a month of local chapter bingo games made me more sales than being on TechCrunch ten times.

That said, with a view to giving people the best possible advice, I've been told by people who are deeply in the Valley ecosystem that the fact that TC and whatnot are for better or worse the paper(s) of record for the Valley ecosystem means that you probably do want to be in them when you are hiring/seeking funding/etc, both for visibility and for social proof. Be that as it may, there are many, many, many companies which will succeed in selling millions, raising funding, and hiring employees without ever having a single visitor from TC et al darken their doorstep.

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

#46

Post by sylvainkalache »

patrickambron wrote: post #29
ecaradec wrote: post #4

The 60k users 60 hours is just the end result, but the slideshow is not about quick results as I expected : it's about iterating around different things to see what sticks until you find something that works. "Presenting one feature at a time" is a quite useful thing because it allows you to talk about yourself regularly with a slightly different angle and it create news all the time.

Hi, I'm the author of the slideshare/founder of the company. You are right, before the actual surge, there was a lot of upfront work understanding how to build our product and how to tell our story. That said, once you have the right product with the right viral loops we learned that taking an extremely focused story (check out this ONE feature) to the right audience accelerates growth like crazy

Hello Patrick,

First of all thanks for sharing, awesome story. We, at SlideShare, are currently running a contest "My Startup Story": http://blog.slideshare.net/2013/09/04/slideshare-contest-wha...

Your slide actually match what the contest ask for, so I invite you to join it. You just need to edit pour presentation and add the tag "MyStartupStory".

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

#47

Post by patrickambron »

sylvainkalache wrote: post #46
patrickambron wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I'm the author of the slideshare/founder of the company. You are right, before the actual surge, there was a lot of upfront work understanding how to build our product and how to tell our story. That said, once you have the right product with the right viral loops we learned that taking an extremely focused story (check out this ONE feature) to the right audience accelerates growth like crazy

Hello Patrick, First of all thanks for sharing, awesome story. We, at SlideShare, are currently running a contest "My Startup Story": http://blog.slideshare.net/2013/09/04/slideshare-contest-wha... Your slide actually match what the contest ask for, so I invite you to join it. You just need to edit pour presentation and add the tag "MyStartupStory".

OK great, I will definitely join

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

#48

Post by patrickambron »

whitlock wrote: post #44
patrickambron wrote: post #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…

Patrick, I heard Pete's story on NPR a while back and how it helped your company grow. It stuck out since when the reporter tried to verify the story they found no results. The reporter comes short of accusing you or your co-founder of telling a fake story to sell a product. I'd like to hear you or Pete's take on this story (URL below). http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/05/29/187080...

Thanks man. I remember that interview (it was a headache). The interviewer seemed to have an agenda going in. Before the interview he kept saying he thought it was "foolish that people would use Google to research people in the first place" and that "nobody should believe Google results anyways".

When Pete was in college there were several criminals who all shared his name and his results were a mess. One of them included a story about someone suspected of dealing drugs. At the time we never thought to save or bookmark those results because we had no idea we'd be starting a company and being interviewed by NPR years later.

We couldn't find an exact article about a drug dealer (perhaps it actually was taken down). We WERE able to show him several other results with about criminals with his name. We linked him to them. When he asked us about it, we told him we couldn't find it, but we offered to redo the interview and be less specific "Pete was being mistaken for criminals with the same name" since we could show results for that.

In his article he claims we simply did not respond to these requests. When I asked him about it afterwards he apologized and said "he must have missed that email". He didn't update the story though. It seems like he wanted to tell a story about how online reputation management helps people permeate lies and that's why you shouldn't trust Google.

All that said, we learned a valuable lesson. We no longer use the term "drug dealer" we use "criminals" and we link to specific articles we're still able to find so people can't question the validity

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