Never Launch, Just Iterate
marketing.fm
marketing.fm
Satisfied, returning users is the only way to really grow a business, it's easy to see why:
Even if everybody in the world came by tomorrow but nobody got stuck you'd be looking at 0 traffic on Friday next week, but if instead of that you'd have 1000 new users each day of which 10% got stuck you'd have at least 2,000 visitors per day by Friday next week.
Now 2,000 visitors per day doesn't sound like it is much but depending on the product you might already be in the 'black' at that level. And if not, wait 90 days...
In practice it is a lot harder to get people to come again to your site than it is to get random individuals to come just once.
I remember coming across google the first time and instantly changing my homepage from 'altavista' to 'google'.
That's all it took, it simply worked and worked so much better that there would have been no reason to draw out the switching process.
And if you want 1,000 new people per day organically, you pretty much need 200-300K users for them to tell their friends about you.
A big media launch will put you on the map, sure only a tiny portion of users will stick around, but those few will give you that starting base to jump off from.
I don't see why that 10% stickiness you talk about, wouldn't also work during a launch. Sure you'll probably get a lot more lookie loos, but surely you'll reach a wider audience.
I'm actually doing a "launch" tomorrow, Hopefully I'll get some coverage, and if it's nothing but lookie loos, I can always go to doing the X users per day thing.
As for 1,000 people per day costing you a thousand bucks, you're doing something wrong there. 30K per month gets you at least half a million uniques per month in a competitive market, but you'll have to do your own 'buys', not go through a middle man.
A big media launch will get you most likely about 10 to 15,000 users and you'll drop to about 100 or so after one week. You don't have to believe me of course, but I've been there and done that several times now, the pattern for me so far has been fairly consistent.
People that come from a newsfeed are usually not actively looking for what you are offering just moderately curious.
The time you get them to 'stick' is when they are really in need of what you have to offer.
I'm going by the rate of return on ads I've seen in the past. Sure you get a ton of clicks, but only a tiny portion actually registers. Way below that 10% you've talked about.
No I trust you, I had a launch similar like that with another site. Had 60K the first two days. 20K on day 3. Then it slowly dwindled down to 1000 users a day. Those seem pretty loyal, but the problem was that it was a content site, that was generated entirely by me, and it wasn't worth focusing all my energy on something that brought in 2-3 bucks a day.
The text I gave the link is: "If you (or your significant other) want to look your best"
If you want a different text let me know.
Ads are imho a waste of money unless you have a direct track between click and sale and you can measure very accurately which dollars spent give you how much worth of income.
Agree fully on the ads, the only reason I spent any money, was because I had some facebook and adwords credits. And since I'm not even running any ads now(don't want to scare off users), there is no X in ads = X new subscriptions.
Oh btw, I have the url fixer plugin for firefox, and it "fixed" your site to www.com, happened like 3 times before I realized what was going on, you should email that developer and tell him to whitelist your exact url. If that works, you'll get a ton of extra traffic.
The guy behind that plugin is http://www.chrisfinke.com/
edit: ok, second link is also up, together that should get you about 3.5M exposures per month, I'm really curious what it will do for you.
Actually I just checked out and www.com appears to be a domain squatter(although he sells www.com email addresses, but there is no site), maybe you could even convince him to change www.com to ww.com
[envy] It is probably the best ROI anybody ever made. I wouldn't be selling if I were in his shoes either, he gets 150K uniques daily on that domain without lifting a finger. [/envy]
I'm not sure what your definition of 'not all that great is'.
As for your friend, he could lose that domain in a heartbeat if netflix set their mind to it.
You can probably sell it for some multiple of that because 1ct per click is ridiculously low.
So we're talking about at least half a million dollars per year here and probably substantially more, 100% pure profit, near 0 expenses.
Here is a sample of the data of such a site:
http://ww.com/adsense.png , these pages have three adsense tags on them, two with pretty good conversion, one a lot less (but still 3x better than the 'overal average' of all adsense tags that I run.
21,500 euros is roughly 30,000 dollars, 3 million impressions is also roughly 3 million uniques on sites like this, so figure dividide by 20 to get to 150K uniques, which is just about 1500 dollars per day.
And that's just adsense, you can bet that people that live of this stuff tend to put a few more tags on those pages.
The CTRs are ridiculously high because the user doesn't have much choice, they can either click an 'ad' or click 'back'.
Not a very honorable business model though, but then again, would you say no to a free $0.5M per year ?
Good luck!
I actually started this site, because I always have problems deciding what to buy. I think I own like 3 or 4 things, that I bought myself, the rest I had to get a second opinion to makeup my mind
Rather than starting with the statement "never launch, just iterate" it would be better to start with the following question:
"Should I start a business that lends itself to iteration?"
That's an interesting question that's worth discussing. But as it stands this post is the wrong answer to the wrong question. (Which also shows how you can often catch sloppy thinking by making explicit the question that a statement is answering, and diffing that with the question you should be asking.)
edit: I think the actual answer is that you should choose to start a business that lends itself to iteration, but that's different than the advice given. It's another case where the given advice is close enough to the truth that it tends to work, but the underlying rule is still wrong.
At least one restaurant opened in your city last week. Of the set of restaurants which opened in your city last week, one of them is last in the alphabet. Without checking either what restaurants opened last week or what the reviews say about them, what did the reviews say about that restaurant?
You should be so lucky as to have everyone know how bad you are.
I don't know any of the restaurants that opened last week, because I get my information about restaurants from restaurant early adopters and reviewers. This is how most people get their information about restaurants. That's why it makes sense for restaurants to follow Geoffrey Moore's advice of using the "bowling alley strategy" from Crossing the Chasm.
If you open a restaurant, you know in advance that you need to have a strategy to get restaurant early adopters in the door. And you also know that restaurant early adopters are the kind of people, by definition, who don't go back to the same place twice if it isn't very good.
Basically, it's only luck if you're successful without knowing this and having a plan to deal with it. And counting on this happening is a poor backup plan at best.
A restaurant that keeps its doors closed for the first two months had better have some great food to reclaim all those overheads when it finally opens. How can you be sure that the food is ever ready if you don't bring in at least a few customers?
I'm only saying this is sometimes the case.
The web was just a tad simpler over a decade ago when Google 'launched' initially. In fact a lot of the web's titans like Ebay, Paypal, Google, Amazon etc.. were 'launched' during a different era if you will... It was called the 90s. I'm not so sure the same rules apply today. One should at least consider that things have changed in this regard.
Every other product Google's come out with since then was 'launched' in what we'd consider the 'traditional' way. Gmail was invites, Wave is invites.. Maps was released with a lot of fanfare.
What I do agree with is that immediate or front page media attention after launch is not indicative of the app's future success. In fact it seems the more hype things have in the beginning the less staying power they seem to have in the long run but I suppose it can go both ways and there is no one rule..
A few thousands visitors does NOT mean you're doing things right, in fact it could be reinforcing poor judgement and a bad product. I've seen this happen countless times by founders who didn't know when to stop drinking their own kool-aid and meaningfully evaluate product holes because a handful of visitors swore it was the best thing since slice bread.
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