How We Grew Our Blog to 5,000+ Subscribers in Five Weeks

I once spent a month creating and tweaking a country-specific tech news blog and realized that 85% of the tech news (in this other language) was regurgitated US tech news with, as you said, pretty much exactly the same info. Eventually, I put a stop to the blog because it wasn't something people were looking for (that is, translated, country-specific tech news).

thx Jess! Glad you're digging the series :)

if you look at the blog as an attractor for a market segment, (i.e. startups), and you can make the startups believe you are similar to them (just like you are, we struggled to get traction, and here is how we did it & you can do it too, etc... - i.e. the topics of this blog post series), then when the times comes for those startups to buy a customer support app, the hope is they will remember groovehq and recall the warm fuzzy feelings and try it.

people buy from people they "like", and they "like" them because they sense they have something in common with them.

also the implied "we are helping other startups succeed by sharing our lessons learned" influences others whom are not directly in the target customer segment. and when they hear about someone who needs a cust support app, they can recall and recommend groovehq, because the thought has been planted. the lessons in the blog have not touched on the above influence directly (yet), but a main lesson that appears again and again is the need to do your homework, research, analyze and study current market leaders, and apply your hypothesis from what works for them to your own situation. not copy the methods directly, but apply a framework of concepts, customized to your product, customer segment, situation, etc.

this is just one set of topics, and it is getting attention, so their approach seems to be working. later, they could start a topic series about customer support, and since they already have an audience, the impact would be greater than the vanilla blog posts about customer service that they had written before. this secondary topic series could focus on what they didn't like about leading cs help apps like zendesk, etc. that would attract csr's that felt the same way about zendesk, form an association between like minds (i.e. they think just like me, so i like them), and increase mind share and curiosity about the app. a lead is created.

if you haven't had the experience of trying to sell your product or service through a website, (where you didn't speak directly to a lead / prospect / customer), you'd never know how hard it is to estimate and understand why people buy things. many times it has nothing to do with logical comparisons of features and benefits, instead it come from something their mother told them when they were 5 years old (i.e. pretty means you can trust someone, etc). and if people only bought the BEST product on the market, there would only be 1 product / company in each segment, and that's not true. consider how many Apple haters there are who use an Android phone. some people buy other brands simply because they hate the leading brand. so there is an opportunity for every company to fit in somewhere.

i hated this series when i first started reading it. now i digest it with a inquisitive eye that attempts to look behind the curtain to figure out their goals, strategy & tactics, to see how it can work for me. i'm not trying to learn directly from what Alex writes, but learn what he is doing and why it "appears" to be working in his favor at this current moment.

and in regards to transparency, i must comment on these blogs thru hacker news, because i was blocked from using disqus on their site, probably because my initial criticism of their approach was not aligned with their goal of getting everyone to "like" them. just my assumption, but why else would i have been "blocked"?

use the akismet plugin to block majority of spam comments / attacks