31 days, 120,000 hits, and $462 in revenue. The Startup Foundry’s story.
thestartupfoundry.com
thestartupfoundry.com
In November 2010 I discovered Kinect hacking and created a blog with the latest hacks, http://KinectHacks.net, just for fun. Since it was the only blog about the topic at the time it grew quickly and the in the first month it reached 100 000 unique visitors and 300 000 pageviews. In the end of January it had gotten over a million pageviews.
I eventually got tired of running it, it took time away from my real business, so I sold it on Flippa.com for $12600 (http://bit.ly/hBcQQb , requires login).
One of the best tips I can give you is to invest in a realtime analytics service like Clicky, which I used. It's really helpful for immediately noticing when stuff go viral and take action on it.
Another cool thing is that the new owner spent just $200 on Facebook advertisements and got over 10000 likes for the group (https://www.facebook.com/KinectHacking) in a week because of it. I've always heard that Facebook ads don't work, but it surely worked in this case. Just goes to show that you should never take stuff as granted before you've tested it yourself.
My own (limited) experience is that Facebook as can be very effective at driving traffic to your Facebook page. To your website? Not so much.
Talk is cheap. Anyone could SAY they are going to compete with Google, Facebook, or the whatever the biggest player in the game is. It's a whole lot harder to do it. You came out and boldly proclaimed that you were going to start an alternative to TechCrunch and you are well on your way to doing this.
My one constructive criticism is that you spend some time getting more comfortable with your interviewee and with yourself. I've never met Andrew Warner but he's comes off as being very charismatic while being genuine at the same time. I can't imagine anyone watching him and not liking the guy. Part of this is probably his natural personality, but a big role is because he also comes EXTREMELY prepared to his interviews.
I don't have any tips for you on increasing your charisma, but I will say that your on air persona is an important part of your brand/product and there's a certain something that's missing there although I can't name it.
I expect to see you reaching greater and greater levels each month!
Go GoatButt!
All the best, and keep kicking ass!
Hits technically refer to each request for an item to your web server. So one page view can have 10+ hits if you take into account that each image can be construed as a hit. It doesn't help that some web analyzers still continue to measure and proactively show hits almost as synonymous to a pageview. It isn't.
Of course, if you were following the true spirit, we'd see a hockey stick chat comparing TechCrunch's launch traffic to your projected traffic :)
I don't report on startups. I interviews founders after they built their companies to find out what worked and what didn't.