November 19, 2012 at 15:21SmartProgress Success Story and Our Promotion Experience
2 months ago, we launched a beta version of our project (a post on the hub ), which received good reviews and recommendations here. Honestly, we did not expect such a large influx of users at the start.
In this article, I intend to share the experience of launching and promoting a project on the network.
I have always believed that startup projects should be brought to perfection and only then let them go on a long voyage. The ReWork book from the 37signals founders changed my mind on this. A considerable part of the book narrated that “licking” a project is not necessary at all, and is even contraindicated. Real users who have tried the raw product themselves will tell you in which direction to develop the project. So in the end it happened - at first a lot of mistakes and inaccuracies got out that we ruled on the fly, then people started to publish their wishes, a lot of ideas appeared in our process. Now a development plan for a project to increase the functionality has already been drawn up, and much that will be implemented was not even conceived from the very beginning. All this is confirmed by the fact that the most important thing in the project is the launch of the main working version,
So, the first 2 weeks we spent on corrections. In parallel, we were promoting the project on the network. We had little experience in this matter, so the matter went rather slowly.
We started with the simplest and most obvious - with forums and blogs. We tried not just to spam (we did not use automatic mailings and bots), but to conduct a dialogue with users, we wanted to convey the essence of the project to those who might at least be interested in something.
The most popular network forums with the highest attendance were touched, in total about 10 large sites. The result - a lot of effort has been spent (registration, posting, communication with members of the forum), there is practically no result. From all sites about 300 visitors combined. It seems that the forums are dying out for the most part as a format. Regulars who sit there, conservatives to the depths of bones and feedback from them can not be expected.
The next step we chose appeals to thematic resources, one of them was life hacker.ru.
An interesting feature is that we wrote to them, but did not receive an answer. “Standard situation” - we thought and safely forgot about them. After a week (maybe a little less), “Metrika” begins to go through the roof - unexpectedly and unexpectedly a post appeared on the life hacker, which brought us very high-quality traffic, the failure rate was minimal, which was very pleasing.
This ended the free cheese. Further went personal investment.
Yandex.Direct - I selected low-frequency queries, trying to reduce the cost of a click, but on average about 20-30 cents came out, the traffic came in high-quality, but at this stage it seemed expensive to us. If I selected keywords less competitive, then the traffic became ineffective, the percentage of failures increased at times.
BloggerTwitter advertising turned out to be the cheapest, but also the most inefficient. Blogs yielded results, but also small, while they stopped the campaign.
Vkontakte groups were surprisingly a good way to tell people about the project. On average, groups of the order of a million people take about 2000 p. per post with a link to the site and 1500 with a link to a group in VK. They have such rules - the post hangs for a day, exactly after 24 hours they delete it. Since they didn’t post in any entertainment groups, namely thematic ones, the traffic was of high quality.
Now there is targeted advertising in VK , which is bearing fruit.
According to statistics, 75% of men and 25% of women live on the service.
Age 90% of users from 18 to 35 years.
Already, about 7000 people have registered on our site. But you need to consider that 5500 of them used our know-how - a toy account. This account is given for a month so that the user can try the basic features of the site, and then is deleted.
Over time, we began to notice that the service outgrew even our expectations, if initially it was just a site for publishing your goals and communicating between users, now new horizons are opening up. Some participants find people with similar goals and unite to help each other, for example, moving to another country, others find like-minded people on their project, and others find business partners. Also, investors who were looking for interesting projects from us were noticed.
Since the launch, we have changed a lot in the project, made it more friendly, but we don’t intend to stop there. This is only the main part of the changes and innovations that occurred over 2 months:
1) Launched the English version of the site.
2) Changed the main page of goals. In addition to design, the flow of goals has also changed. Now we divide the goals into “Interesting” and “Everything.” Goals that have an extensive description and are divided into stages fall into “Interesting”, in addition, such goals should be of public interest, and “Everything” - a common stream of goals. In addition, we conduct constant moderation and clean the branches from test targets, advertising messages and all kinds of garbage.
3) Added the ability to write conclusions to goals. Conclusions are the result of all your work.
4) Added a list of users and a list of subscriptions to the goals that interest you.
5) Changed and supplemented the page editing goals, now all stages are easily interchanged and deleted.
6) We paid great attention to social networks. Now on the site you can register through popular social networks, at the request of many users have introduced the function "share with friends."
In general, the project has great potential. Judge for yourself - on what other site do people come up with their life goals and dreams, share the progress of their work projects in the public domain. If, for example, people can search for business partners on the freelance exchange simply by posting a message, then here you can conduct your project publicly (publish the progress of the goal), and if it is really interesting, then people themselves will start to be interested in it.
If you do not want to share your goal with everyone, it’s not a problem, you can make it private and yourself monitor your progress, keeping all the information about your goal in one place.
We will be glad to meet new friends and progressive people who achieve their goals.
SmartProgress Achievements of goals
In this article, I intend to share the experience of launching and promoting a project on the network.
Launch
I have always believed that startup projects should be brought to perfection and only then let them go on a long voyage. The ReWork book from the 37signals founders changed my mind on this. A considerable part of the book narrated that “licking” a project is not necessary at all, and is even contraindicated. Real users who have tried the raw product themselves will tell you in which direction to develop the project. So in the end it happened - at first a lot of mistakes and inaccuracies got out that we ruled on the fly, then people started to publish their wishes, a lot of ideas appeared in our process. Now a development plan for a project to increase the functionality has already been drawn up, and much that will be implemented was not even conceived from the very beginning. All this is confirmed by the fact that the most important thing in the project is the launch of the main working version,
Promotion
So, the first 2 weeks we spent on corrections. In parallel, we were promoting the project on the network. We had little experience in this matter, so the matter went rather slowly.
We started with the simplest and most obvious - with forums and blogs. We tried not just to spam (we did not use automatic mailings and bots), but to conduct a dialogue with users, we wanted to convey the essence of the project to those who might at least be interested in something.
The most popular network forums with the highest attendance were touched, in total about 10 large sites. The result - a lot of effort has been spent (registration, posting, communication with members of the forum), there is practically no result. From all sites about 300 visitors combined. It seems that the forums are dying out for the most part as a format. Regulars who sit there, conservatives to the depths of bones and feedback from them can not be expected.
The next step we chose appeals to thematic resources, one of them was life hacker.ru.
An interesting feature is that we wrote to them, but did not receive an answer. “Standard situation” - we thought and safely forgot about them. After a week (maybe a little less), “Metrika” begins to go through the roof - unexpectedly and unexpectedly a post appeared on the life hacker, which brought us very high-quality traffic, the failure rate was minimal, which was very pleasing.
This ended the free cheese. Further went personal investment.
Yandex.Direct - I selected low-frequency queries, trying to reduce the cost of a click, but on average about 20-30 cents came out, the traffic came in high-quality, but at this stage it seemed expensive to us. If I selected keywords less competitive, then the traffic became ineffective, the percentage of failures increased at times.
BloggerTwitter advertising turned out to be the cheapest, but also the most inefficient. Blogs yielded results, but also small, while they stopped the campaign.
Vkontakte groups were surprisingly a good way to tell people about the project. On average, groups of the order of a million people take about 2000 p. per post with a link to the site and 1500 with a link to a group in VK. They have such rules - the post hangs for a day, exactly after 24 hours they delete it. Since they didn’t post in any entertainment groups, namely thematic ones, the traffic was of high quality.
Now there is targeted advertising in VK , which is bearing fruit.
Figures and Awareness
According to statistics, 75% of men and 25% of women live on the service.
Age 90% of users from 18 to 35 years.
Already, about 7000 people have registered on our site. But you need to consider that 5500 of them used our know-how - a toy account. This account is given for a month so that the user can try the basic features of the site, and then is deleted.
Over time, we began to notice that the service outgrew even our expectations, if initially it was just a site for publishing your goals and communicating between users, now new horizons are opening up. Some participants find people with similar goals and unite to help each other, for example, moving to another country, others find like-minded people on their project, and others find business partners. Also, investors who were looking for interesting projects from us were noticed.
Scope of work
Since the launch, we have changed a lot in the project, made it more friendly, but we don’t intend to stop there. This is only the main part of the changes and innovations that occurred over 2 months:
1) Launched the English version of the site.
2) Changed the main page of goals. In addition to design, the flow of goals has also changed. Now we divide the goals into “Interesting” and “Everything.” Goals that have an extensive description and are divided into stages fall into “Interesting”, in addition, such goals should be of public interest, and “Everything” - a common stream of goals. In addition, we conduct constant moderation and clean the branches from test targets, advertising messages and all kinds of garbage.
3) Added the ability to write conclusions to goals. Conclusions are the result of all your work.
4) Added a list of users and a list of subscriptions to the goals that interest you.
5) Changed and supplemented the page editing goals, now all stages are easily interchanged and deleted.
6) We paid great attention to social networks. Now on the site you can register through popular social networks, at the request of many users have introduced the function "share with friends."
conclusions
In general, the project has great potential. Judge for yourself - on what other site do people come up with their life goals and dreams, share the progress of their work projects in the public domain. If, for example, people can search for business partners on the freelance exchange simply by posting a message, then here you can conduct your project publicly (publish the progress of the goal), and if it is really interesting, then people themselves will start to be interested in it.
If you do not want to share your goal with everyone, it’s not a problem, you can make it private and yourself monitor your progress, keeping all the information about your goal in one place.
We will be glad to meet new friends and progressive people who achieve their goals.
SmartProgress Achievements of goals