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.<p>"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 Guys,<p>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<p>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.<p>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<p><a href="http://www.patrickambron.me/we-unexpectedly-got-60k-users-in-60-hours-what-we-learned/" rel="nofollow">http://www.patrickambron.me/we-unexpectedly-got-60k-users-in...</a>
There's a lot of good information the slides, but for the quick and dirty:<p>1. They found one feature that a lot of people enjoyed (some would call this a MVP) and lots of people shared it<p>2. Mashable picked up on it and then other publications did.<p>3. Massive growth.<p>The main takeaway that I always tell startup people:<p>1. Marketing works, don't neglect it. (in this case PR worked extremely well)<p>2. Don't do marketing until you've found the one feature everyone wants (i.e. product-market fit)
Numbers of registrations is a vanity metric.<p>How many used the core product?<p>How many retained?<p>How many converted to paying?<p>How many told their friends?
Hm, it sounds like they just got lucky, so i'm not sure what the lesson is here. A sample size of 1 is useless for learning what works and what not. I would be far more impressed if they would get similar results repeatably after each promoting action.
I'm sorry this is off topic, but that slideshare ui is so annoying. Why doesn't it progress one slide when I click on the slide? I hate how I have to precisely click on that tiny "next" button to go to the next slide.<p>I'm posting this hoping someone can provide an easier way to navigate.
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.
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.
At its core the product itself is pretty weak. Its recommendations boil down to linking in and out of various profiles, updating descriptions and adding photos...<p>As a case study this is a lovely bit of UX, CRO and digital marketing though.
A signup conversion rate of 30+% from news articles on <i>Mashable</i>, <i>Huffington Post</i>, <i>Yahoo! News</i>, social sharing, and direct and search traffic is just incredible.<p>Is that typical for this type of service?
one thing i don't get: if i google someone and find their brandyourself.com profile, wouldn't i (if i'm familiar with the service) conclude that they're using it to bury results and search harder?
The pivotal moment that the OP talks about is being covered by Mashable, here:<p><a href="http://mashable.com/2012/05/01/brandyourself-google/" rel="nofollow">http://mashable.com/2012/05/01/brandyourself-google/</a><p>The claim that the service can tell you who Googled you is partially true...if someone Googles you and <i>if</i> they happen to click through to your BrandYourself page, then BrandYourself can guess the IP against a list of publicly known servers.<p>This is a useful service for those who can't set up their own website (and set a tracking script)...though let's face it, most readers were thinking that the service could conclusively show you any Google search.