Zaarly: How To Get 100,000 Subscribers In 3.5 Months – with Bo Fishback | Hacker News Reader

Zaarly: How To Get 100,000 Subscribers In 3.5 Months – with Bo Fishback

mixergy.com

74 pointsandygcook33 comments

This is a great interview. But, the guy that started Zaarly worked at an organization for a few years that allowed him to get in contact with huge stars with lots of followers. He even mentioned emailing Ashton Kutcher well before starting Zaarly.

This is similar to how Kevin Rose was able to get Digg insanely popular within a short amount of time (through Cnet).

The morale of the story? Know how to utilize your connections.

The idea is genius and I can see why it's successful. It fills a very real need that otherwise hasn't been filled with services like Craigslist and Ebay.

I tried Zaarly, encountered a bug, and -- for the first time ever -- had someone actually respond in the Olark chat widget when I said something about it.

(After googling them, the person who responded was a "marketing coordinator", so hopefully my bugreport gets passed on unmangled to the developers. Still, very cool to have anyone at all actually responding to me.)

Glad we were able to help!

Members of the Zaarly team from pretty much every department sits on the livechat at different times. Everyone from marketing to design to development spends time on there to learn from actually talking to users first hand.

Your bug report will be delivered untarnished, I assure you (=

David Spinks Enforcer of User Happiness

tl;dr - get ashton kutcher and demi moore to tweet about it.

So what you got out of my interview is that just a tweet from 2 famous people results in 100k subscribers?

We were actually surprised at the lack of results relative to more traditional media and PR coverage. Getting celebrity tweets helps to get a few users, but it won't get you close to 100k in a few months if you don't do the other things right.

There's absolutely more to this video than just that. I've been pondering the whole "chicken & the egg" predicament for my launch; just as recently as earlier today. I've yet to find/hear a good recent startup story about going 0-100 in a heavily 2-sided business. A lot of the bigger, hyper growth startups (Yelp, GroupOn) seemed to single marketplace launch. It's great to finally hear of someone doing a large launch and the tactics they used.

Thanks Andrew, I felt it was one of your best interviews.

That's where I stopped reading.

You're not curious about how he got those two people to invest in his company? Or how he turned their support into subscribers? Or how Zaarly got those subscribers to get their friends to try its service?

Even if you don't like me, I hope you don't lose sight of what Zaarly did or what you can learn from it just because it has a few well-known backers.

Okay how about "have a founder who knows Levar Burton & have him tweet to a landing page before you're even live...". This is such a huge boost out of the gate, I don't know why you try to downplay it.

I'm one of the first engineers to join Zaarly, I've been with the company since pre-launch (late April). I can tell you from analyzing the traffic statistics myself that these traffic bumps are extremely short-term. Tweets from celebrities give you a spike for a few minutes, but that's about it. That's useful for sure, but it won't get you to 100k users by a longshot.

Still, if you're looking for a lesson to gleam from the whole celebrity thing, it's that networking is important in business (shocker). Networking and connecting with people -- especially those who are well connected -- who are excited about your business can be beneficial, but only if you do the other things right (building the product, attracting users, etc).

But seriously, you're completely missing the point if what you got out of this was "find some celebs to rep your brand".

Regardless of how you slice it the celebrities were integral to the marketing strategy of Zaarly from the start. They added credibility & interest that would not otherwise be there, not just on twitter, but on a national level. You talk to some news editor and ask them "some tech startup that's going to do some marketplace thingy just launched..." & they're going to say "yeah, so what?" if you respond "well Ashton Kutcher liked it" the editor is going to say "Now that's somethin' we can write about!". Also every fluff piece in the future is going to mention the celebs, who knows what that does for SERPs & traffic.

Yes there were other social media & offline marketing strategies. Yes there was a lot of hard work but you cannot escape that the title should have been "Successful & seasoned founder with cash to burn & celebrity connections garners 100k users in 3.5months." It's still impressive & he used his connections & resources wisely. Kudos. My beef is less with Zaarly & more with the title of the article.

Thanks, I stopped reading after your comment.

Wow, what a sensationalist headline, how's the CTR?

Yes, and then in the interview, Mr. Warner says something like "if people think they can just watch these interviews, take notes and then replicate the success, they are delusional". So he's pretty much admitting the article is pure link bait and there's not much chance another startup will have the same luck. Bo Fishback himself says in the interview that it's unlikely it could be replicated. The thing is, I actually do want to be able to watch, take notes and repeat the steps other founders used to get traffic and users. So give me realistic and concrete examples of what is possible for the average founder to do to get users. For example, the other day I went on Yahoo Answers and answered a bunch of questions with links to my website. It was boring and tedious, but the next day I had about 100 referrals to my site from Yahoo Answers. That's the kind of thing I want to learn about - it's simple enough, repeatable and it works. Just doesn't make for sensational headlines.

Here are some of the things they did to get to 100k members. (I couldn't squeeze them into a headline, but the substance belongs in the interview, not the headline.)

- Bo got well-known backers because he did something that many other founders put down -- he got a job. He worked for the Kauffman Fund, which introduced him to the startup community's founders, investors and other supporters. He built up a reputation by helping the community. That helped him get top investors and supporters.

- When some of his famous backers tweeted links to his site, he converted those hits into email subscribers so he could build a relationship with people who were interested in Zaarly's vision of the world.

- He converted early fans into communities. These communities met both online (Facebook) and offline (meetups) and helped introduce others to Zaarly.

- Zaarly cultivated evangelists, some of those evangelists came up with promotion ideas that Zaarly's team couldn't have come up with on its own. One guy lived on nothing but what he could order on Zaarly, as a way of dramatizing how helpful the service could be.

- To ensure that new users who wanted to hire help on Zaarly got service, it partnered with other companies. At SXSW, for example, they teamed up with rickshaw drivers and paid them to fulfill requests. (If anyone reading this is trying to build an online marketplace and is having trouble solving the chicken and egg issue, I think our discussion of how Bo activated his marketplace through partnerships like this will really help.)

I don't want to turn this comment into a rehash of every point in the interview, but I promise that I care about useful tacts and ideas. I give you my word that I go after them and pack them into my interviews.

That headline is backed by hours of research before the interview, and a mutual goal with Bo during the interview.

Thanks, Andrew, for posting a transcript of the interview as well as a summary of some of the things Zaarly did to reach 100k members. From reading the transcript, it appears that being featured in the Apple and Android app stores was also extremely helpful. I was surprised to see the press exposure didn't really help, though.

I was surprised about the press exposure too. We all assume big press is guaranteed help.

Bo spoke at our Entrepreneurs Unpluggd Kansas City event in November about finding first customers and talked a bit about this if you're interested in watching the video: http://www.entrepreneursunpluggd.com/blog/zaarly-bo-fishback

Andrew, I just watched the video and reading your summary here actually helped me a lot in synthesizing what has been told in the interview.

I just wanted to let you know I got a lot of value in reading your summary too. The tactics outlined in the interview stood clearer when you wrote them in a list.

Thanks for everything you do with Mixergy.

Thanks. I'm looking to hire a writer this year to do this kind of summary for my interviews.

I can see that it'll be helpful.

Excellent synthesis Andrew, thanks for summarizing this. From my perspective, you really nailed it with the third and fourth points -- fans, communities and evangelists. It was truly amazing to see how excited people got about Zaarly and how it's morphed into a really unique and active user base.

But who wants to be an 'average' founder? :)

Wow, the Zaarly story blows my mind. It rivals the Airbnb story. Since their launch I've always wondered how they overcame the initial "chicken and egg" problem.

Get past the first 15 minutes or so, and there is a ton of value in this video. I highly, highly recommend watching the entire thing.

Balancing the two sides of a marketplace is one of the toughest tasks for an early two-sided platform. Great work!

You're right David but, as someone who has built a couple of marketplaces, I find that founders often don't spend enough time on the "tougher" side. The common mistake (been there, done that) is to spend something like 60% of your time building the harder side and 40% of your time building the easier side. Instead, you should probably spend something more like 98% of your time building the harder side and 2% of your time building the easier side.

Which is the harder side? Generally, it's the people with the money. :) However that's not always the case. If you've stumbled into a massive market with high demonstrated spend it might actually be harder to build the supply side. I'd side that's likely the case with a company like AirBnB (they've done a great job building both sides of course).

If you can build the more difficult side (usually demand) it will typically pull supply out. It typically doesn't work the same in the opposite direction.

Mixergy looks good - can anyone comment on if it is?

I've been a paying subscriber for a few months. It's hit and miss. The value you get really depends on how well the information lines up with your particular business model.

A lot of the courses feel more like product demos ("here's the hard way to do it, or you could just sign up for my service, look how easy it is"). Not that they're worthless, but it's hard to give impartial advice and pitch your product at the same time.

(And you can't really expect people to just give away their best secrets. The best tricks are the ones that would stop working if everyone was doing it...)

That said, a few of the courses have inspired me to explore ideas I would have otherwise dismissed, and some of those ideas have worked out pretty well. Ultimately, $25/month is not a lot, if I bring in one extra sale, I've made a profit.

Just don't expect pre-packaged miracles.

Hell yeah.

In my eyes, Andrew Warner is the same caliber of interviewer as Charlie Rose. He's a natural and was born to do it.

This results in very thorough interviews that provide actionable tips that you can think about and apply to aspects of your own company.

I've been consuming the free interviews for about a year and subscribed to Mixergy Premium about 2 months ago and it rocks.

I wrote a blog post the other day with a list of things you can do to afford Mixergy Premium in 2012[1] which is basically just me saying I think it's awesome and valuable and that $200 for 1 year is such a small amount of money that you can make it back in any number of really trivial ways.

Andrew also offers a 100% money back guarantee so that if you think the paid service is junk he just gives you your money back. Can't lose! I love it. Keep up the great work Andrew :)

[1] http://www.workingsoftware.com.au/page/A_list_of_things_you_...

Mixergy is awesome. The thing I love about it is that it gives you tons of things to try out.

No one single interview is going to give you the silver bullet for your business, though. In fact, many times you'll hear one interviewee say "Tactic X was wonderful" and then another say "Tactic X was worthless."

But there's so many good interviews and Andrew is great at extracting the core of the ideas that there's no reason you or I couldn't try the tactics and see how they work in our respective situations.

Been a long time fan of Mixergy. Andrew has a talent for digging into the responses from founders to try to get real, honest answers out of them.

Mixergy is really interesting and it's refreshing to hear someone like Bo Fishback who's pretty down to earth talk about how execution is everything.

You can get the podcasts for other episodes here - http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mixergy-audio-podcast-cha...

Peter - Mixergy is awesome. Such a great collection of learning and lessons there.

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