It strikes me as odd how many of these growth hacking stories describe a web analytics tool (as in the linked article), an email subscriber system, or a CMS extensions/hosting solution. Throw a rock in any direction and you'll hit 20 of these accounts.<p>Watching some Microconf presentations I was struck by the same thing. The talks were dominated by people who had created Wordpress plugins, created an SEO tool, or built an email autoresponder. There's a strange circularity to it - almost like a pyramid scheme.<p>Maybe this reflects a coincidence of interests: people who like growth hacking enough to write about it tend to create SEO tools and email drip systems.<p>OTOH, maybe the lessons these stories teach are too specific to be useful for other kinds of businesses.
> I started emailing bloggers in the SEO space, inviting them to try Siteguru and write about it. At the same time, I hired a linkbuilder to reach out to relevant sites that could feature my tool.<p>> The result? Zero. Nothing.<p>Ha! The number of spam emails I get, sometimes I wonder if there is actually a good product like this which might be useful but gets lost in the sea.<p>Edit : really nice and to the point product, found a bunch of issues with my website. Now all my broken links are fixed and the website has a favicon!
Really nice blog post. Regarding the free page-check without login vs requiring login; I’m not so sure it’s as clear cut as put there. Signing up for a service with significant community backing is a lot less scary/annoying than signing up for something that no one ever heard of.
Congrats to the OP, but I am assuming that these are 1000 users who are on a 'free' account? If so, I'd be interested in hearing about strategies to convert these free accounts into paid subscriptions in the future, or monetising them in some other way. I assume that is the end goal of SiteGuru? To be profitable in some way?