How We Unexpectedly Got 60K Users in 60 Hours (2012) | Hacker News Reader

How We Unexpectedly Got 60K Users in 60 Hours (2012)

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135 pointssunasra58 comments

The 60k users 60 hours is just the end result, but the slideshow is not about quick results as I expected : it's about iterating around different things to see what sticks until you find something that works.

"Presenting one feature at a time" is a quite useful thing because it allows you to talk about yourself regularly with a slightly different angle and it create news all the time.

Well, they HAD very quick results in a certain period of time, the author explains it in detail on slides 20-30.

But the point I take from that story is that the surge in growth didn't happen because they were working directly in a shortcut. Rather, there was a lot of hard work going on, with multiple tactics being tested at the same time, and the quick results were a direct output of that approach.

> it's about iterating around different things to see what sticks until you find something that works.

There's no other way. I found a lot of useful nuggets in the article, nevertheless.

Hi, I'm the author of the slideshare/founder of the company. You are right, before the actual surge, there was a lot of upfront work understanding how to build our product and how to tell our story. That said, once you have the right product with the right viral loops we learned that taking an extremely focused story (check out this ONE feature) to the right audience accelerates growth like crazy

Hello Patrick,

First of all thanks for sharing, awesome story. We, at SlideShare, are currently running a contest "My Startup Story": http://blog.slideshare.net/2013/09/04/slideshare-contest-wha...

Your slide actually match what the contest ask for, so I invite you to join it. You just need to edit pour presentation and add the tag "MyStartupStory".

OK great, I will definitely join

Hi Guys,

My name is Patrick, I'm the CoFounder of BrandYourself and I'm the one who made this presentation. I read HackerNews everyday, and was literally knocked off my chair when I saw my own presentation on the front page. Thank you

I've gotten some great feedback. Some of you have asked some great questions so I'm going through now to answer as many of them as possible.

In the meantime, some of you mentioned this would be more consumable in a blog post. Here's a link to the original blog post I wrote about this--it actually includes a lot more data

http://www.patrickambron.me/we-unexpectedly-got-60k-users-in...

Patrick,

I heard Pete's story on NPR a while back and how it helped your company grow. It stuck out since when the reporter tried to verify the story they found no results. The reporter comes short of accusing you or your co-founder of telling a fake story to sell a product. I'd like to hear you or Pete's take on this story (URL below).

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/05/29/187080...

Thanks man. I remember that interview (it was a headache). The interviewer seemed to have an agenda going in. Before the interview he kept saying he thought it was "foolish that people would use Google to research people in the first place" and that "nobody should believe Google results anyways".

When Pete was in college there were several criminals who all shared his name and his results were a mess. One of them included a story about someone suspected of dealing drugs. At the time we never thought to save or bookmark those results because we had no idea we'd be starting a company and being interviewed by NPR years later.

We couldn't find an exact article about a drug dealer (perhaps it actually was taken down). We WERE able to show him several other results with about criminals with his name. We linked him to them. When he asked us about it, we told him we couldn't find it, but we offered to redo the interview and be less specific "Pete was being mistaken for criminals with the same name" since we could show results for that.

In his article he claims we simply did not respond to these requests. When I asked him about it afterwards he apologized and said "he must have missed that email". He didn't update the story though. It seems like he wanted to tell a story about how online reputation management helps people permeate lies and that's why you shouldn't trust Google.

All that said, we learned a valuable lesson. We no longer use the term "drug dealer" we use "criminals" and we link to specific articles we're still able to find so people can't question the validity

If you were having trouble finding articles, what's with the Google screen grab on slide 6? Was this something you created specifically for the slides? If that is the case, showing a fabricated screen grab without noting it as such seems a bit disingenuous. It's a bit like selling a diet with a doctored "before" picture.

I agree, it is disingenuous, especially in this context. That slide was specifically made for an in-person presentation that was later posted online (it was posted by somebody else about a year ago). For the sake of a presentation, we thought that image got the point across much better than putting two hyperlinks on the screen. It was basically a design decision. In retrospect we should have put a disclaimer on the image since it looks so realistic, but we honestly had no idea the presentation would live beyond the room I spoke to. That was a mistake

We used to use a similar type image on our about page, but for the same purpose now only link to exact articles or results we can still find. https://brandyourself.com/info/about.

Thank you for answering my question. I was afraid you'd skip it if there was truth in what NPR had presented.

I'm probably not the only person who felt that you and Pete are misleading people with the story of Pete's online profile after that interview. In some ways it may have done more harm than good overall.

Have you done anything since then to try and get NPR to correct or update the article?

Well it was interesting. He asked us if we had a link to the drug dealer article. We looked and couldn't find one. I was in contact with him the whole time, sent him links to other criminal results and even offered to do the interview over and be less specific and say "criminal" instead of "drug dealer". I told him the merits of the story were still true, we could still show that Pete shared google results with a criminal, and we even put him in touch with the person who worked at the company who found the results. Instead he posted the article implying it might not be true, and said when he asked us about it "we went silent". I followed up with him after and he said that he didn't seem my emails (even though he answered some of them)...

We were worried that people would feel the same way, but in general we only got good responses from the interview. We signed a lot of people up, too.

That said we've been careful to be much more specific in the future. We don't want to mislead people especially since it could hurt our brand. The truth is, Pete's results were a mess and it was hurting him. He shared a name with several criminals. There really was a drug-related article about a Pete Kistler but we can't find it (we never thought to keep it)--so now we only say "criminals" and link to the articles we HAVE found

There's a lot of good information the slides, but for the quick and dirty:

1. They found one feature that a lot of people enjoyed (some would call this a MVP) and lots of people shared it

2. Mashable picked up on it and then other publications did.

3. Massive growth.

The main takeaway that I always tell startup people:

1. Marketing works, don't neglect it. (in this case PR worked extremely well)

2. Don't do marketing until you've found the one feature everyone wants (i.e. product-market fit)

I'd call that USP (Unique Selling Proposition) rather than MVP - the MVP would be the minimal product incorporating the USP.

Good point. I guess my point was that many people have built businesses on a sole USP (or hence what I would consider a MVP)...semantics...semantics...

Exactly. We already had the MVP--the key here was boiling down our product into a value proposition people could quickly understand. Rather than saying "we can match an ISP to a location and company" we said "you can figure out if an employer or ex gf googles you"

Thanks for summarizing.

The content would be a great deal more consumable (and sharable) in a blog post that didn't require 75 clicks to view all of the content.

I originally wrote a post on my personal blog about this. Let me know if you find it helpful :)

http://www.patrickambron.me/we-unexpectedly-got-60k-users-in...

Numbers of registrations is a vanity metric.

How many used the core product?

How many retained?

How many converted to paying?

How many told their friends?

That's definitely true, but it's not a like a fly-by-night social network that won't retain any users. They got users because of a specific service that seems very valuable in certain cases and the virality was relevant to their service. So even if conversion to paid customer was low, it's still a pretty big funnel compared to a startup offering something similar and grinding it out to get a top-line funnel of 500 signups.

That's a very good question. We're not a social network or a game, so most people come to us to solve a specific problem: they don't like their Google results. We have a free product because we realize many people simply want to be more visible, they want to make sure their portfolio or linkedin profile actually shows up. Other people have more to promote or are trying to bury something embarrassing. These are the people who use the product more and pay for premium.

To answer your questions

"How many converted to paying" --about 3% converted to paying, which is slightly lower then our normal traffic (4-5%). A lot of the "non-converts" were part of the foreign traffic we eventually moved to a wait-list until we can enter those markets with a more strategic plan

"How many retained" --This is an interesting question. Most people used the product, 3% paid. Remember, our product is meant to be free, so many people do some upfront work and then just check their email progress reports to make sure everything is still OK. Our email open rates have never dropped below 60%, so many people are retained in the sense that they check those emails. We'll have people who signed up during that surge that will pay us for the first time today based off one of those emails

"How many told their friends"

About 75% of users tell somebody else. This is based on a user survey. The problem is, almost all of them tell people in person. They tell them over dinner, or at an event when someone mentions their Google results. We haven't figured out a way to capture that same rate through online vehicles.

Hm, it sounds like they just got lucky, so i'm not sure what the lesson is here. A sample size of 1 is useless for learning what works and what not. I would be far more impressed if they would get similar results repeatably after each promoting action.

I was going to say the same.

How we got 60k users in 60 hours: make something useful that people really want.

> How we got 60k users in 60 hours: make something useful that people really want.

And tell them about it in a way that they understand

And identifying "them" properly

The fact articles like this surface again and again suggests that these three steps are not so easily remembered nor followed in the heat of the moment.

I think this was the key takeaway. Making a product people want is the first step. The second step is boiling it down into a message people quickly understand. If we described our product as "DIY SEO tools to improve your personal SERPS" people would quickly overlook it. However, by emphasizing the story/benefits, people see how it relates to their life. "Improve what shows up when employers, clients or even dates Google your name". That's way easier to understand

So browsing nginx logs for my vanity domain and running whois queries for the IPs at 3am is not nearly as weird as I thought.

On that note, how exactly are they reaching conclusions on where Googlers who are Googling you actually work? (i.e. their actual company name, not just the physical location their IP address maps to).

I second this question. What are the best databases out there, that map IP addresses of office space, not web servers, to company names?

I see some products out there that purport to do this, but they aren't saying where they're getting their data. I'm really curious how they are creating such a database.

LinkedIn, for example, would have such a db, since people surf LinkedIn from work. However, they're not granting access to it, I'm sure.

Who else could generate a strong database like this?

We used a company called LeadLander for this when we were in the B2B space. Since qualifying leads and negotiating a deal were harder than lead identification for us, this was mostly a vanity / fun project, although it was successful in motivating us.

There are actually a lot of different databases that match IP addresses to companies, university's etc. For example, Max Mind GEOIP has some of that info. The trick was just compiling those different sources into a more reliable custom database. We still have a lot of work to do to continue to improve that database

I'm sorry this is off topic, but that slideshare ui is so annoying. Why doesn't it progress one slide when I click on the slide? I hate how I have to precisely click on that tiny "next" button to go to the next slide.

I'm posting this hoping someone can provide an easier way to navigate.

Use the keyboard

Thank you, Sir. I went down that route by wondering if "space" or "enter" would do it with no luck. I stopped short at arrow keys.

We do support that, your cursor needs to be on the right to go forward and on the left to go backward.

I noticed the 'do things that don't scale' actions like delivering a trophy with cookies to the 10k user or writing personalized emails to every new customer.

Yes within the company we've adopted a motto "customer service is the most underrated marketing channel". I think this is what has driven most of our steady growth which comes through word of mouth

It's interesting to see. If nothing more, I at least learned(again) that powerful marketing is the key for successful product/service - front page on HN/TechCrunch/Mashable/etc is definitely something that every startup should focus on in the beginning.

I absolutely disagree with your last statement. Many niche startups--those without mass appeal--have no reason to focus on TechCrunch. There may be some all-important blog in their field, though.

Think Patio11 focused on getting BCC on the front page of Mashable? I highly doubt it.

I think it depends on your business model and audience. As a b2c product, any press is good obviously. However, I think it's more important to understand who your audience is and how to relay your story to them in a way that's digestible and understandable.

I'm pretty sure that time the Jane Austen Society called for a month of local chapter bingo games made me more sales than being on TechCrunch ten times.

That said, with a view to giving people the best possible advice, I've been told by people who are deeply in the Valley ecosystem that the fact that TC and whatnot are for better or worse the paper(s) of record for the Valley ecosystem means that you probably do want to be in them when you are hiring/seeking funding/etc, both for visibility and for social proof. Be that as it may, there are many, many, many companies which will succeed in selling millions, raising funding, and hiring employees without ever having a single visitor from TC et al darken their doorstep.

At its core the product itself is pretty weak. Its recommendations boil down to linking in and out of various profiles, updating descriptions and adding photos...

As a case study this is a lovely bit of UX, CRO and digital marketing though.

A signup conversion rate of 30+% from news articles on Mashable, Huffington Post, Yahoo! News, social sharing, and direct and search traffic is just incredible.

Is that typical for this type of service?

Basically anything around 8% is considered very good. We spent ALOT of time optimizing our sign up flow. We did hundreds of usability tests. I think the key was making it clear what the product would do and why they needed to complete each step. We tweaked language until nobody in a usability test seemed confuse. We removed any step that people didn't actually need.

We continue to focus on this. Even as we've grown we've maintained a free sign up rate of 15%

I didn't learn anything reading those slides

me too xD

Homeboy flew out and delivered homemade cookies and a trophy to his 10,000th user. Awesome.

Haha thanks

The real question is how many sign-ups will occur from being on the front page of HN?

I'll do a follow up on this :)

one thing i don't get: if i google someone and find their brandyourself.com profile, wouldn't i (if i'm familiar with the service) conclude that they're using it to bury results and search harder?

Can you help me to not have any results in google about me?

From what app is the screenshot in slide 25?

That's just a custom report from Google analytics

The pivotal moment that the OP talks about is being covered by Mashable, here:

http://mashable.com/2012/05/01/brandyourself-google/

The claim that the service can tell you who Googled you is partially true...if someone Googles you and if they happen to click through to your BrandYourself page, then BrandYourself can guess the IP against a list of publicly known servers.

This is a useful service for those who can't set up their own website (and set a tracking script)...though let's face it, most readers were thinking that the service could conclusively show you any Google search.

where is this 'list of publicly known servers'?

do you mean just doing a reverse ip lookup? because often the ip address of the server is different than the ip address used by the business when people are browsing.

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