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100,000 Users And So Can You (A history of Carbonmade)

68 点作者 maxstoller超过 15 年前

7 条评论

spencerfry超过 15 年前
Someone asked why we haven't updated our homepage in 3 years (and the significance of that) and if I could speak to that. The comment got deleted before I could respond, so I'll just create a new thread.<p>It's partially covered in the article. The first year, we were still do consulting work, so we barely spent any time on Carbonmade. And then in the second year, we were working on a second product that never saw the light of day. And now in the third year, we're focused on Carbonmade exclusively and nearly ready to release the new version.<p>Here's what I learned from running a company for three years without any update to the product: Excellent customer service could be the most significant thing you can do. (Granted, you need a pretty solid product.) During the first year we were really bad with emails and responding to our customers around the Net. We practically ignored everyone and everything. We just didn't have the time. Then in year two, I began to take customer support very seriously. I'd respond to peoples emails within minutes (when I could) and within hours 90% of the time. You literally can take a look at our graphs and see a HUGE uptick in signups/paid sign ups/customer retention within a month of responding to emails.<p>I also went back through at least 6 months of old emails that we had simply archived away and responded to everyone explaining how sorry we were for not giving them good support and answering their questions. I wrote everyone individually and got a lot of "it's no problem, I'm happy that you're spending the time to do so now." It really impacted our brand a lot and we saw a lot of people begin to respond with emails like: "Wow, you guys responded faster than I've ever been responded to before. You're so great. Thanks so much for your service. I'm telling all my friends."<p>Also, around this time I chose to treat all customers equally no matter if they were paying or if they weren't. I figured -- and you'd think this was obvious -- that spending a few extra minutes to treat free customers well will make them more likely to upgrade and actually costs less (in time and money) than going out and finding new customers. This turned out to be very successful. I can point to hundreds of emails from free customers that upgraded after hearing back from a "real person who was kind and helpful".<p>Good customer service is king and really turned our product around.<p>(Thanks for reading my rant.)
评论 #895538 未加载
mrshoe超过 15 年前
&#62; <i>Creative people are likely to be friends with other creative people who turn out to need portfolios themselves, and this creates a rapidly expanding circle... our users derive a direct benefit from showing off their portfolio, which in turn is free marketing for our service.</i><p>If you're a startup looking to get noticed online, I'd suggest taking this to heart. Marketing is much easier if your users have a strong incentive to market your product for you.<p>&#62; <i>We don’t subscribe to the "Release Early, Release Often" philosophy. Admittedly, we’re perfectionists to a fault, but when you’ve got 158,000 pleased users, you can’t simply disrupt things with a series of bells-and-whistles updates just to follow a silly motto.</i><p>I don't think that philosophy is meant to apply to applications with hundreds of thousands of users. It's meant for the early product development phase when you have very few users. You can, however, do bucket testing, like Google and other larger players, and release updates to a tiny portion of your users to see how they react.
评论 #895377 未加载
jasonlbaptiste超过 15 年前
This is a GREAT read. I love stories that get into the nitty gritty details. Sort of like Founders at Work. 100k users don't come out of nowhere. There's a lot that causes that and lots of tinkering. Figuring it out is great.
fjabre超过 15 年前
Thanks for this piece Spencer. Very inspiring indeed.<p>I really like the "Give the demo a try" feature on the landing page. Could you give any insight into whether this see-for-yourself feature really aided in getting signups..?<p>I was thinking about doing something similar for my site, which is why I'm asking...<p>Thanks and best of luck on your continued growth.
评论 #895556 未加载
raghus超过 15 年前
Just saw this from 37s: <a href="http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1976-launch-haystack-a-better-way-for-web-designers-to-find-clients-and-for-clients-to-find-web-designers" rel="nofollow">http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1976-launch-haystack-a-better...</a>
asmosoinio超过 15 年前
Font looks very odd on my Vista machine, but I am a happy user of Readability: <a href="http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/" rel="nofollow">http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/</a>
mistermann超过 15 年前
The white on black overlaying everything just grates on me for some reason. Otherwise very nice.