We were reading Xobni’s great article about how they started off with a different idea, and converged to an idea that seems to be getting traction.
Here’s the article:
http://gigaom.com/2008/05/11/xobni-our-path-from-wrong-product-to-killer-app/
What’s most interesting is the negative commentary by the peanut gallery at the end of the article. C’mon- it’s hard and a lot of work to build something compelling. Give the Xobni guys a break.
Some notes from the Sun’s fun Startup Camp, held May 4 and 5 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
So, how do you get your first 50,000 users on your consumer-facing Website - and get past the ‘cold start’, without paying a lot of money for advertising? Here’s the theory.
So let’s say you have a website that you feel is ready to share with the world, with zero (0) users.
The basics:
1. The first milestone is to get to 100 real, engaged users. It’s all about engagement- time spent on the site, repeat visits, and a good user experience (say 8 out of 10 on a satisfaction scale).
You can do a lot of testing/iteration/improvement with just 100 users. So email your friends, tell them to pass the email on. If you are having trouble even finding 100 users (let’s say you just don’t want to spam all your friends), then try Google AdWords. See #2 below.
What’s the goal at this point? The goal is to make sure that your product either looks good, or works good. If it satisfies either criteria, then it has a chance of catching on in the market. It may be unlikely that you’ll have satisfy both criteria in a new application (but if you do - kudos and keep on going).
2. Once you have a reasonable product (aka it looks good, or works good), the next step is to ramp up traffic. There are a few ways to do this:
- Use Google Adwords. Search is the second most common activity on the Internet (after email) and comprises about 40% of Internet advertising revenue. This means that using search methods (Adwords or SEO) to drive traffic is a good idea, even if it means paying a little money.
The great thing about Google Adwords is that you can measure and A/B test landing pages, and improve copy, graphics, etc. So you can iterate and discover what works and what doesn’t.
So buy some traffic from Google, measure conversions, and hopefully your user base will start to increase. At the least, you’ll learn how to make your application better.
- Use SEO techniques to improve your position on search results.
2.1 Use viral marketing techniques & build viral loops into your application. This is something that social networking (Facebook/OpenSocial) apps typically do. For more about viral marketing and loops, read this terrific blog: Andrew Chen’s Futuristic play. Viral techniques allow you to acquire users at very little cost, assuming that you have designed things well.
3. Track metrics, A/B test, and iterate.
Your site can definitely be improved. Use Google Analytics to see how your site is doing. Make changes to improve conversion rates, reduce bounce rates, and drive traffic to the pages you want people to go to. Use A/B testing to improve copy and graphics.
4. Reach out to people by email. Consider a email service like ConstantContact.
4.1 Reach out to people even after they have registered on your site. For example, if they haven’t come back to visit the site in a week after registering, send them a reminder email.
5. Participate in the blogosphere. Read and leave comments on other blogs, and write your own.
6. Partner with other startup companies to drive awareness of each other. Together we stand!
Some other ideas:
7. Consider using an affiliate marketing service, like CommissionJunction .
8. Use social engineering with a time limit to entice users to sign up. For example, ‘the first 25 users to sign up in the next week’ will be featured on our home page.
9. Consider a giveaway, for example, some hot gadget that doesn’t cost a lot, like a iPhone, tied to an email promotion.
10. Paying more money - PR or marketing consultants or trade shows. Trade shows can be well worth it, if you are starting out.
So, you’ve reached 100 users. What’s next?
Consistently track and analyze page views, unique visitors, time spent on site, referral sources, bounce rate, and registered users - so you can spot trends and trouble, and either continue what you’re doing or change course quickly.
So The next milestones are:
1. Get to 1,000 registered users. If you can’t get here in a reasonable amount of time after launching, you may want to consider changing what your consumer-facing site is about.
2. Get to 10,000 registered users. No big celebration here - just keep on going. Hopefully you’re getting that major hockey stick in terms of website traffic… (hello TechCrunch).
3. Get to 50,000 registered users. Once you get to this number, all sorts of wonderful network effect things happen, and if you can keep it going, you’ll be on your way. Congratulations on a nice start.
This post is by no means complete. Any other Startup Camp attendees, please let me know if I’ve left obvious stuff out. Gotta go to sleep now.
PS Many thanks to Mary T. from Foldier , a cool online file-sharing service, and Lee from TheWorldIs , a social network with lots of nice pictures - for their participation and comments.
This is adapted from watching some cable news station en route to San Francisco:
1. Lose weight (that’s right - each pound less is a pound less that your car needs to carry).
2. Don’t drive your friends. (Imagine - 300 pounds less in your car!)
3. Lose the 50 pounds of junk out of your car trunk.
Conclusion: Losing weight is good for the environment. So is having fewer friends to drive around.
Something I noticed while out at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco:
There are a lot of smart, accomplished engineers, executives, and entrepreneurs out there.
But in order to really get superstar-credit as a young entrepreneur, I think there is a clear bar:
Start at least 2 companies with exits of at $1 billion. Doing more than one shows that it wasn’t a fluke.
There’s just a handful of entrepreneurs on that list. Marc Andreessen (Netscape, Loudcloud) is getting a lot of credit these days for Ning. Max Levchin (Paypal, Yelp, Slide) also is getting a lot of press. He’ll probably hit the bar. Obviously, Steve Jobs, amongst the older generation, and all the other A-list names that you already know.
Larry and Sergey are undeniably brilliant, but who knows if they had to start from scratch, and if they hadn’t stumbled upon the biggest technology gold mine invented in the last 10 years? I guess reaching a $100+ billion valuation qualifies you for the superstar list, even if you’ve only done one.
On my way back from this year’s (2008) Spring Web 2.0 Expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It was really great to see the energy from the dozens of startups out there. The trade show floor had more of an ‘enterprise’ feel than a ‘consumer’ feel.
It was really good to get out here, being a native New Yorker.
Here’s some (obvious) things I noticed - reminded of again.
1. The people out here live and breathe Web 2.0. By the time you read about a development on a blog like TechCrunch, they’ve already been working and buzzing about it for 9 months ahead of time. It feels like we really are about a year behind in New York City, and that’s not a good thing for startups.
2. People are still pretty optimistic, recession be damned. Hope springs eternal.
3. The few Web 2.0 companies that have achieved scale like Slide and RockYou are going to be hard if not impossible to catch. There’s a lot under the hood that they’ve learned over the last year, from how to iterate a FB app quickly and get it out and virally tune it. How to monetize their widget networks. They’re on the cutting edge, iterating fast, and constantly innovating. Hard, if not impossible, for a new competitor to beat. Congratulations.
4. OpenSocial is really trying. FB is the leading social app platform. OpenSocial, I hope, will make an impact. Nice guys from Google evangelizing it.
5. Some people are bitter about FB platform - there are some winners and losers, and some unhappy people. The FB platform is a year old now, and hard for a newcomer to hit the top 100 apps. It’s possible, but it takes some luck and a lot of intuition and experience with building an app.
6. The way to succeed is with velocity. There’s no substitute. The best startup companies are the fastest. By being first to market, and iterating, the applications get better, and the company know-how gets beter. The company learns how to develop for a new market.
7. Development methodologies for consumer-facing Web apps emphasize customer feedback, rapid iteration, and metrics. RockYou claims 15 releases a day. Slide and Dave McClure both emphasized metrics in their talks - tracking conversion rates, viral coefficients, A/B testing. If you are developing features ‘in a vacuum’ then you run the risk of being irrelevant to the target market.
8. Let amount of time dictate feature set, not the reverse. So start with a time budget, and force your engineering team to prioritize the single most important feature to implement. Have a 2 day budget for a new Facebook app.
9. Use AdWords to drive traffic. If you have a viral app, that will be enough to seed the traffic.
10. This is a winner take all marketplace. You’ve got to be the top dog, and/or possibly survive at second place. There are no crumbs for the third place winner. This is why it’s good to fail quickly, and move on to a market where you can be a first place winner.
I’ll publish another top 10 list later.
Traction is the ‘it’ word for startups.
I think we’re going to get a lot of traction. We’re just getting started. Hopefully I’m right.
It will also be clear if we’re not getting traction, and then, the thing to figure out is why?
I encourage all my loyal blog readers (you know who you are) to contribute some comments.
(temporarily removed to prevent alcoholism… )
note to all — we decided to call it an alpha after all - see the logo we used. That being said, we’ll go into some type of limited beta by early June 2008. The moniker ‘beta’ would have understated the amount of work we have left to do before an actual launch, as the product neither looks as good as we need it to, nor does it work as well as we need it.
ladies and gentlemen…
after many long, hard, arduous months of development….
we are pleased to announce….
kickfly alpha preview release!
Seriously, why are we calling it a preview? Because it is *not* any type of public launch of our site. But we wanted to get our fans, friends, and other people in our network a chance to try out what we’ve been working on, and get some early feedback. So please sign up, give us your feedback at forum.kickfly.com, and start making cool 3D stuff.
Once we’ve gotten enough feedback, we’ll implement changes - there’s going to be a lot of stuff to change and work on. So your feedback is always valued!
At some point in the near future (we’re now thinking September) - we’ll have an official beta launch. So this preview is just an opportunity to get some feedback and so what we can improve. In the meantime, enjoy, we have a lot more going on that we’re looking forward to showing you.
BTW - if there are any potential business development partners out there - when you hear about us, see our stuff and you like it, please let us know by sending an email to info@kickfly.com. We’ll be happy to hear what you’re thinking about.
We have a little discussion going on right now about whether to call what we have ‘alpha’ or ‘beta’. It’s clear that a lot’s going to change in the next 2 months - but we also have code that doesn’t crash and seems to work pretty well.
So - what’s better from a marketing perspective? alpha or beta? We don’t want to scare people off with ‘alpha’, but we also don’t want to let people think that this service is close to being done with ‘beta’.
I actually think ‘beta’ will win. We’ll see…
Development is non-linear - just because we spend time on something doesn’t mean that the ‘visible’ results are improving in direct proportion.
We had a tough week. It’s now 4:30am. But it looks like we are on target to have a build on our production site. We had to do some ‘clean up’ on our build.
Again, it’s interesting how there are always more things to fix to get an app to a decent level to show other people. And if they think it sucks, well, then there’s even more to do!