Lessons Learned After Year One As a Startup Founder | Hacker News Reader

Lessons Learned After Year One As a Startup Founder

derekflanzraich.com

I met Derek when I was on vacation in NYC last summer. He took the time to meet with me (a nobody who he just "knew" from twitter) and explained me the big vision behind Greatist. He's crazy passionate and not afraid to make mistakes (which this article shows perfectly.). It's been awesome to see him talk to the "big guys" in the fitness industry all of a sudden. This shows, once again: Hard work pays off, people. Go Derek & go Greatist! :)

Thanks Fey-- means a lot.

Absolutely great story and thanks for sharing. This sort of sharing is invaluable for those trying to start something.

Nice site and I can see why it has gained so much traffic. The biggest question is - how did you get this traffic?

Have you paid for any advertising? How much is driven from advertising or organic growth?

Thanks-- and glad you found it valuable!

Our growth has been nearly entirely social, with the 60% driven by sites like Pinterest, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, & Twitter. The rest mostly comes from our syndication partnerships. Outside of some free trials from Google Adwords, we've never paid for any visitors... and we've never been covered by any major outlet either. We've grown 35% on average each of the last 5 months & it's all organic.

Pretty impressive. Is your social driven traffic via your own profiles on these sites or users/readers?

Mix of both, we've got some pretty epic profiles-- but the majority comes from others sharing our stuff w/ their friends. Strong believer in this as a trend (Buzzfeed talks about this, too: http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/content-shared-close-fr...)

  4. Surround yourself with friends who will remind you
  you’re awesome when you need it & shit on you when it’s
  time.

I hate it when my friends go out of their way to say nice things about my work. They do that because they know much effort I put into my work, and they don't want to make me feel bad.

But this is counter-productive. You're not helping me if you don't point out what can be improved!

Exactly. Recently I asked a friend to check out a site I just uploaded, he sent me some nice compliments. Later I realized that on IE (which he uses) the layout was all off.

I need to find some meaner friends.

in my experience, most ppl even friends won't give much of a damn about your site, and will just casually play around with it and say 'that's nice'.

however, a stranger that needs your site will give you a bunch of gems.

You need honest friends. I looked at a little iOS game a friend of mine was doing. I told him what I like about it. I also told him everything I thought was wrong about it. He was asking me for honest feedback so I gave it.

I didn't have to be mean about it, just clear and straight forward. "I don't like the way this works because ..." "I don't like the way this looks because ..."

Real feedback is much more helpful.

I, actually agree with the author. I am based in a city where entrepreneurship is not the common thing. My friends from that city told me many a times that I'd fail.

Its painful. You need support on some days. And surrounding yourself with people who provide positive energy is such a great thing.

Your friends perhaps see the potential of your work and not its current state? :-)

Once I had a friend check out my site. However, he spelled it wrong and went to a domain parking page. He had just said, "oh it looks nice," before I cut him off and told him the right spelling! :D

Thanks for sharing your lessons. The biggest takeaway for me is this:

> Literally schedule in specific time to think & be creative– you need it.

Are you planning to partner with a larger conglomerate like Everyday Health to make money through advertising, or you plan to build your own sales team?

Also, do you have any plans to increase engagement in your site? I envision the number of page views per visitor is 2-3 or so?

Lastly, how would you remain sustainable if Google one day decided to penalize you for whatever reason?

Thanks for reading-- we're actually currently partners w/ Everyday Health for advertising & have no plans to build out a major sales team in the near future. We're hoping to build a business that isn't driven by ad sales, but instead driven by guiding people to products, tools, and services that are as high-quality as our content & will help them achieve their goals.

In terms of engagement-- we have a lot on the way. Right now our focus has been purely to build the highest-quality brand equity and an audience. We've got a 26% return rate, so think we're doing something right so far-- though obviously there's a long way to go and a lot more to do.

Our traffic is currently less than 6% driven by Google search-- but we're already ranking for some pretty awesome terms ahead of some classic incumbents. We believe we're writing among the highest-quality content in the space already (every fact cited by a PubMed study, every article approved by multiple experts) & that if we keep consistently doing that and people keep returning & noticing that we likely won't penalized by Google in the future. My take at least!

Guiding people to products, tools, and services that are as high-quality as our content & will help them achieve their goals

So, advertising?

edit: also, what are your sources of traffic if only 6% google? I mean, is it diversified or all coming from a big single non-google?

Ha-- nope, apps, subscription services, etc...

Re: traffic, more on it in the comment below, but more than 60% is driven by social.

wow, up to 800k visitors per month after only 1 year? Impressive! How are you getting most of your traffic, if you don't mind me asking.

Check some of the answers above-- thanks for reading!

Any plans on adding additional traffic drivers beside content, such as interactive fitness tools?

Oh yeah. Stay tuned! :)

Nice. If you ever want to explore drop-in route planning using maps (OSM and/or google), as well as activity tracking using GPS data, we have an extensive javascript API to interact with our service. Basically, we handle everything complicated, and it's just a matter of JS developers and designers making it nice on your front end.

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