How our SaaS startup got 1000+ signups in just 7 days, without getting Crunched. | Hacker News Reader

How our SaaS startup got 1000+ signups in just 7 days, without getting Crunched.

blog.groovehq.com

121 pointsalexmturnbull43 comments

Since the design and consistent integration of design components throughout the app,site,etc was so important. I hope future posts will include screenshots and some examples.

Also, I admire the way you guys use twitter and other social media to leverage your userbase. Indirectly causing your users to vote up you HN story for example. sort of win-win in that you get more exposure (and maybe more signups); I learn about an interesting new company; and your users feel like they're helping you out. (With the ongoing cascade that now they are more likely to do you favors, they feel more like a distinct community, etc)

I see no evidence that those 1000 signups can be attributed to your pretty design. In fact, I dare say you held the belief that design was important long before the product release, which is why you invested your time in it. Perhaps it was the particular domain or the viral marketing.

Conclusions without evidence is just conjecture and supposition.

Loved the post, but as a programming single-founder with next to no design sense (I would design something like HN) this article makes my checkbook cry blood.

I suppose it makes sense that your design suggests to people if they should invest time in your idea because you invested time into it.

Seeing it in writing helps drive the point home.

Also, big congrats to the Grove team, the site and product really do look beautiful.

We are in an age where even ramen-lovin' back-end programmers with no design talent (like myself) have no excuse for ugly web designs.

Thomas and I chat about this periodically. For about $15, an hour of browsing ThemeForest, and half a morning with 960.gs and Compass/Sass/whathaveyou, you can make any throwaway app look like it had someone with actual design talent touch it.

http://themeforest.net/item/simplpan-admin-panel-template/fu...

That's one I just happened to grab out of a search for "admin". Does it look like something that got Jediguruninja handling from a team of bespoke design consultants? No, but it sure craters the approach to that bridge, for three to four orders of magnitude cheaper.

Patio11- Design is not just about pretty colors and interface... its more about understanding the audience and their interaction before delving into creating the best user experience. Therefore, what you suggest could be a temporary quick fix that will not give you the results for a sustaining business.

You can never expect a kickass programmer to also have the best design chops. They require different forms of thinking. So stop giving false advise to programmers on enlisting design skills and instead partner with the best designers!

Right - but pretty colors and interfaces go a long way towards someone saying "you know what? I will read the about page" vs. "woah, this is gross - they expect people to use this?".

For $15, you probably won't get the most absolutely-custom-tailor-made experience - but you might at least get something that convinces visitors to take a closer look.

Don't think of the $15 theme as permanently defining the look and feel of your site. It needs to be just good enough when you're starting to look like you have some legitimacy. If you're startup is going to be generating any amount of significant revenue for you, after some amount of time, you'll be able to go back and revisit the design.

If you're a programer and not a designer, just think of your design as another optimization point.

Whenever I worry about the design/branding of my current startup, I visit the historical timeline of amazon's logo as a reminder that we'll be able to make it better eventually, but there's more important things to work on now: http://www.kokogiak.com/gedankengang/2004/07/amazoncom-logo-...

Thanks for sharing the Amazon logo timeline. I have never seen that before and am surprised to see how much it has evolved...

"Understanding the audience and their interaction" is commonly referred to by programmers as "usability engineering" (in design terms, it's also known as interaction design, which is a sub-discipline of industrial design.) It's a talent very similar to programming, and one almost all programmers are good at, for the same reasons they're good at programming: it involves structural analysis of the actions users are performing, getting into the mindset of users, a lot of problem solving and "polishing off burrs" to optimize and automate workflows.

On the other hand, communications design—what you call "pretty colors and interface"—is an entirely different set of skills, honed mainly by years of critical exposure to different visual aesthetics and artisanal practice in replicating those aesthetics to understand their composition. It's an orthogonal skill to programming—but, once it has been done and a suitable aesthetic created for a piece, it's pretty easy for a programmer to take the results (a "theme"), break it down structurally into re-usable components, and then apply those components to solve their problems. The bit the programmer is untrained at, the understanding of what works with what, has already been performed by the designer.

To me, app design goes beyond just looks. Its how it works... how well it flows the user into getting exactly what they want done when they want it. Every color has a purpose for main and secondary actions, every shape has a purpose. Well designed UI will draw a users eyes to what is critical, what is major later, and what is 'be cool to use'.

Ive ran across apps that simply look good but terrible user experience. User experience is what separates the amateur apps to the full blown mega millions..

Thanks for the link patio, found a few that I bookmarked for future use hopefully.

There is a reason why Steve Jobs is successful :)

As a programming single-founder, you have already taken the first major step! You realize your core competency and your weakness and the importance of filling that gap. I wouldn't be that disappointed because I know of a lot of programmers that don't even take that first step. Most of them don't value design because its a foreign world to them.

The biggest recommendation I would have for you is to find a designer that will take your framework and elevate it to the user experience that makes sense to the world...

The Groove team definitely nailed it when they said that design is an important element...

In the same boat as you being a programmer. Apart from Elance for design (ew), and not having design contacts, how would one go about finding a designer to work with?

It's tough. I've had the most success with referrals from friends in the industry. I don't think the average Elance designer is at the level you see on Groove.

Just for what it's worth; the first thing I noticed when I saw your logo was how much it resembles a breast (including nipple!)

Also, you should have a link to your "marketing site" somewhere near the top of the right column of your blog.

good call on the link to the marketing site :) Making an enhancement here now!

Design is the most important part of your product if you are not creating a new market because that's the only way you can differentiate your product. Everybody is going to have the same features and what you are really selling is your design.

When you launch a new product into a new market, the features (i.e. what it actually does) end up being slightly more important than the design. The design is obviously still important, but probably not the most important part of your product.

P.s. I really like the retro-beach lifeguard metaphor for customer service.

And, by 'design' I assume you mean the entire user experience, not just the pixels?

Congrats on semi-launching.

1000+ signups in just 7 days is awesome.

Out of curiosity, what's your conversion rate to paying users?

I doubt you are gonna give out that number, but it would be very interesting to see :)

"The viral sign up form probably quadrupled our signups through sharing the links on Twitter and Facebook."

Does 'viral sign up form' = buttons to share it on Twitter and Facebook? Or did you guys do some form of 'refer 2 friends to get higher in the beta queue'?

Nice write-up, thanks for sharing!

I'd be really interested to hear more about this too. Offhand, it sounds tacky to add Twitter and Facebook links to a signup form..?

From the looks of it, it's buttons to share it on Twitter and Facebook, and if you refer 3 you can get it sooner, I believe.

They have a unique URL you can share via email, facebook etc. If you refer 3 friends, you move up the queue.

I have always been skeptical about such a tactic for B2B apps. They say it worked for them but it seems they are just looking at signups. I'm wondering if they are real users or just people pestered by others to signup so that they can move up in queue.

For what it's worth, I have been using Groove and have been loving it. I briefly looked into other options and the decision to go with Groove ended up being a no brainer - it's beautiful, it's made for people who want to hit the ground running (no learning curve) and most importantly, Alex is a fantastic guy. I don't know him personally...so I'm not just vouching for a friend, but he is extremely professional and ALWAYS receptive to all of the crazy feedback that I throw his way. As a 'customer', I can't think of a time that I've ever felt this special and appreciated. Great job guys!

I love the idea of winning on design - I'm a UX designer, after all - but I question the conclusion that design is how they got all those signups. They may not have been written up in TC, but they were written up in TNW. Did they get that coverage because of the UX, or did they get it because they are in a hot market?

Don't get me wrong - from what I've seen, Groove looks beautiful and well-thought-out from the user's perspective. But a beautiful and intuitive user interface won't get covered by anyone if it's in a market that no one's interested in.

Keep killing it, guys!

My thoughts exactly. It's easy for them to say it's about the design after the fact.

I'm much more inclined to think it has to do with their market, connections, and blog coverage.

Also, the design suffers from a lack of whitespace (feels crowded) and overuse of color. The landing page is way too loud, I have a hard time getting through it.

Really appreciate your insight on how you built your marketing. I have been looking at many different ways to market a product online (http://infostri.pe with little or no money.. or as you say being Crunched. It's a tough road but there is lots to learn and way to get ahead. I should do my own blog post on what we have done at Infostripe. Thanks again.

I'm not sure. As potential user of this product, I really don't care about design. Even usability can be a little off. What I need is: good support, reliability, speed, flexibility/good integration with other things I use.

Somebody mentioned Apple. Is anybody buying Apple XServer disk arrays?

Congrats, the startup i'm working on http://getdealy.com/creative got to 1000 in a few days as well, but this was mostly by Forrst Ads and telling users we had on a couple of other design lists about the deal.

Just signed up for their beta and had a nice chat with what I think is one of the founders. I've used snapengage and olark in the past, have had small gripes with both of them so I'm very interested in trying Groove out. Nice work guys!

I work at Olark - just out of curiosity, what could we do better?

Olark is a great product, only gripe (which isn't a big one) is that I liked having a photo next to my name in the chat box. I felt a photo went a long way when people could actually see who they were chatting with. I haven't used olark in over 6 months though so you may have added that feature in, I'm not sure.

Yes - haha we actually do have that now, but admittedly not as well-integrated into themes as groove has. It's something we'd like to work on more, but there are a couple other items on the roadmap that are much higher priority.

Thanks so much for the feedback :)

It sucks that the "Powered by Olark" text is there even for paid accounts/that it is so big and it sucks even more that it can't be translated to other languages. English text on non-English websites looks incredible non-professional, so much so that even though I love all the other aspects of Olark I've considered switching.

From my Norwegian customer's perspective it looks like a free script. A Norwegian company, Idium, is actually successfully charging 3500 USD for a live chat solution inferior to Olark, but since it's in Norwegian they're able to do it.

Hi Groove Team, first off, congrats! Excellence in execution to the point that I only have 1 piece of very minor feedback: Your helpful chat window, even minimized, covers up your company info in the footer. Just the footer.

Oh, one more thing in the footer - the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service links don't go anywhere. But it looks great otherwise!

The site does look nice and congrats on launching!

The real test will be how many of those signups turn into paying customers.

Congratulations Alex! I've been waiting for something like this for too long :)

Very nice website indeed.

i hope microsoft doesn't get fussy about your name

My initial expectation was that Microsoft had relaunched groove as a saas app.

The site looks great - congrats.

Very sneeky: http://groovehq.com/images/marketing/features/EasilySubmitTi...

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