The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunched

These posts make me want to write a Startup FAQ:

Q: How do I get on Techcrunch:

A: Ignore Techcrunch. Don't waste brain cycles on them. If they cover you on their own, great. It almost certainly won't do anything to improve your odds of success, but it probably can't hurt. A better question to ask is: how do I design and implement the right marketing strategy for my startup?

Unless your target audience is "vapid people who care about online startup gossip rags," then please don't get upset when your launch is 99.999% bounces.

After working on one project for a protracted period of time, we become slightly delusional. We think we matter more than we do. We think people care a heckuva lot more than they do. That's perfectly fine, but you must recognize your own delusions and not base your hopes and dreams on 'em.

Drag in your target customers and adjust from there.

I clicked on the website, yipit. didn't make it any further then the first screen.

The problem is you want a lot of work and personal info from me up front. I have no idea who you are, but you expect me to give you my email right away? Nope sorry I don't trust you.

This is kind of like going to a restaurant you've never heard about, that has no yelp reviews, but is just a giant door. Then before you walk in a guy in a black suit says "There's a $10 cover charge". You ask "What kind of music do you play?" "what kind of food do you serve". You receive no answer. So you turn around, and go next door.

Your start up is special to you, and your mom. Not to me, don't expect me to put any effort into it or trust into you.

Once I love you, then i'll try you.

>Boom. A tweet every 5 minutes. People are re-tweeting the TechCrunch article covering your startup’s launch.

This is something I don't "get" about Twitter or the people who seem to care about it.

There's an awful lot of tweeting and re-tweeting of completely generic "news" like a new post on Techcrunch with nothing added in the way of context or even opinion.

It's pure noise.

Using the social buttons as an indicator, everything on TC gets tweeted hundreds of times while collecting at best a few dozen shares to other services and a small handful of direct comments.

Given that, I'd interpret the "tweet every 5 minutes" to be something like "three meaningful tweets in a day".

>Why didn’t more people sign-up? Why didn’t people complete the sign-up flow? Why weren’t people coming back?

I'd guess it's the same reason behind all the fake emails described in the sign-ups that were completed.

The landing page doesn't adequately or engagingly describe / demo the service and why it's worth a damn. Do that first, then make it trivial to sign-up honestly.

Tech press comes in handy for biz dev, marketing, and fundraising purposes: You can send the article to potential partners and it makes you look legit.

Side-note: This article is on the front page of HN now (congrats to the author, well played!) but there's no link to the company or TC article in the blog, that I can see.

I absolutely know how this feels.

When we announced our game we managed to get articles on a bunch of top tier gaming media. IGN, PC Gamer, G4TV, and a whole host of smaller sites.

And here is what it all amounted to: http://i.imgur.com/IqBcy.png

Sad isn't it.

Each time you get a new article you get a spike, and then a downturn, but each one leaves your baseline higher. Now we get many times the traffic we got in a spike at announcement every day.

And the answer to, "Why won't people share" is probably because people are extremely tired of automated 4square-like notices. I know I instantly unfollow anyone from Twitter if I see a 4square notice. If I started seeing yipit ones I bet I would react the same way.

The Weebly guys at the startupschool this year were awesome. They shared their experience with getting featured on TechCrunch and alike media and how their hopes were once high and then down the drain days later when realize posts on sites like that don't really mean much. What a startup really need is a bunch of people (user, media, partners) talking about it (positive talk) over certain period of time to gain traction and convert more stop-byers to users/customers. The space is getting more competitive and thes things don't mean much these days - - Got featured on TC - Got 1 million users - Got angel funding

This article is completely true about traffic driven directly by TechCrunch: lots of users who test, zero retention.

That said there's a slightly more interesting effect to being featured on TechCrunch, and that's what I would call "rebounds": other media noticing your startup / project / whatever and talking about it.

For instance, one week after Moodstocks Notes (a kind of side project / experiment of our B2B image recognition company) was picked up by TC in 2010 (http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/10/moodstocks-notes-is-stickyb...) [1] it got featured in Mashable (http://mashable.com/2010/12/18/moodstocks/). It drove slightly less traffic, but retention was an order of magnitude higher. Smaller, more focused blogs are even better.

That being said, even taking all that into account, fighting to get on TC is probably not worth it. In our case we basically got featured because Michael Arrington noticed us at LeWeb and thought what we were doing was cool, so it did not cost us too much effort. The only negative effect it had was to delude us into thinking we could have unexpected B2C success at hand and divert part of our efforts away from our B2B product, but fortunately that didn't last very long ;)

[1] Yes, I know, this video is terrible. I still can't figure out what happened...

I can appreciate why this would seem like the morning after a rave, but if you stop and consider what really just happened — a whole bunch of other startup founders just drove by slowly on the way to the next post — then you have nothing to feel sad about.

Those 8000+ visitors are presumably not your target demographic, and it's unlikely that you're solving a problem that they have.

I really recommend that you read the 1st CopyHackers book on identifying the motivations of the people most likely to be your paying customers. Many startups fail because they try to shoot for a general market. In reality, you will convert very well if you correctly anticipate the motivations of the top 20% vs trying to be all things to all people.

The reason is that no matter how great your landing page is, you cannot manufacture motivation in your visitors — even a brilliant product will fail if you market it to the wrong people. Everything in your public messaging should reinforce exactly one message:

We solve X problem for Y.

Resist the urge to add more X, and don't be so hard on yourself if you are ignored by Z, because your product is for Y.

Q. Did you build something users need?

The reason I ask this is because a lot of times, this can be overlooked. I have found myself spending time twiddling with projects that seem cool to me, then when I ask a few friends what they think about it--they are say things like "yeah that's cool, but..."

What comes after the "but" is what you need to listen to. If lots of regular people are raising issues with you're idea, you may want to rethink your idea. The internet is not the field of dreams so just because you build it, it doesn't mean people will come.

Also relying on TechCrunch as your marketing strategy is a poor business decision.

Edit: Also this video from StatupSchool.org by David Rusenko (Founder, Weebly) puts being on TechCrunch, Newsweek and Time into perspective.

http://www.startupschool.org/2012/rusenko/ - Click "Our Story"

Has having the information offscreen (http://yipit.com) until you do the none obvious scroll been AB tested? It screams bad idea and style over substance to me so I would be really interested if you had data contradicting my gut.

LOVE this point...definitely have felt this before at feefighters. however, there are benefits to TC other than just getting signups (especially for non technical startups as some have mentioned). you just have to keep in mind that PR has varying goals: 1) Exposure- people will remember you and refer you when they see you in top press 2) One TC doesnt build traffic/signups, but multiple articles over a long period of time will 3) Brand equity grows with media exposure 4) now you get to put the TC logo on your homepage=social proof=higher conversion 5) Links!

we are planning on doing a big pr launch for matchist when this kind of exposure will serve us well (timing is everything with pr)

We found very similar results. In our experience (Zaarly) tech press has yielded very little long-term value, especially from a user growth perspective. The retention rate of users from article traffic is very, very low. An article on TC, VentureBeat, Pando, etc yielded us very little beyond your standard insular chatter amongst the tech community.

On the other hand, I think tech press can be useful if the goal is not solely user acquisition. For example, if you're simply trying to raise awareness of your brand and product within the tech community, especially amongst investors, I think tech press has some value. Other than that, YMMV.

Techcrunch is by far the most overrated event in the life of a startup. For the life of me, I don't understand why founders don't spend more time getting quality publicity from more mainstream media sources instead.

Ignoring TechCrunch (and other high profile blogs) is bad advice.

Right, the traffic you will get from them surprisingly low, but they are a fantastic source of instant social proof - After all, you must be good, otherwise they would not cover you, would they? ... ;)

A TC logo/quote on your home page can improve conversion rates for years to come.

This social proof is especially useful if you are self-funded, and can not show off your "Received X millions from Sequoia/YC/Whatever..." badge of honor.

Great blog. Exactly how I feel. My question is how do I get traffic? I feel quite lost - we got covered by Mashable and other places and like you didn't get an amazing number of signups - a good number but nothing major. Now I am at a bit of a loss as to how to get people to the site - probably a stupid admission but it feels like the million dollar question to me at the moment.

It's much more effective to go after blogs that cater to your target audience, even if their readership is a fraction of TechCrunch's.

Sounds like a pretty good conversion rate to me.

Was getting on TechCrunch seriously their only marketing strategy?

That shouldn't even be a part of your marketing strategy.

You're still asking for an email address before showing me anything about your site. This is really mindblowing. Why would I hand over a real email address to a site I know nothing about? Why won't you just let me skip and take a look?

I think people are burned out on daily deal sites and deal aggregators. I checked out your product and while it seems to be executed well, it didn't offer me a compelling reason to come back.

Huh, put in some dummy email address. Than hit next. Then go back to yipit.com and you can see the real site.

Asking for an email before showing me what you do is absolutely crazy.

One suggestion: It might be good idea to change your flow so that email is the last think you ask - "and now to get your savings please enter your email".

Given the number of stories that TechCrunch writes per day I fully expect my dog's next poop to be covered at some point.

There is no point even thinking about TechCrunch.

I had no idea people put this much weight on a press release for their start ups. Great ideas are hard to contain on their own already.

My experience with growth curves of social phenomena (blog, card game) is that they have an underlying real growth curve that's slow but steady, plus "impulses" that shoot up high (orders of magnitude) but decay exponentially. To avoid getting depressed, you have to focus on the underlying curve, not the decline that exists when one is getting farther away from a not-controllable (and often random) event impulse.

Who the hell cares? You got 400 people you otherwise wouldn't have.