YesterdayMe: startup growth experience from 1 to 2000 active users

In this post, I’ll talk about my own experience in creating and promoting the startup YesterdayMe.ru . I’ll build the post as a listing of the most significant observations and recommendations during the development of the project, but I will not deliberately draw extensive conclusions in order to fit into the readable volume. Briefly, in the case, based on the experience of the first seven months of the service.

YesterdayMe is a service that allows you to monitor alcohol consumption. I drank it - wrote it down. Different data are built on the input data. Initially, there was an idea to make only a personal drunk tracker, but then, taking into account the wishes of users, the service evolved into a small social network. Now you can follow your friends and compare each other's indicators.

Today the service has about two thousandActive users (use the service at least once a week).




Start The

start was given on April 16, 2010 by the announcement on Habré. The Habraeffect was easily sustained, and from it the first real users appeared on the service. 450 people (out of two thousand) - from the moment of the first announcement and until now. Thanks, Habr!

The project, design and coding began in January 2010, that is, pre-graduation preparation was about 3 months. The task was limited as much as possible so as not to delay the release.

Did the idea go?

Gone. Of course, the service does not pretend to be used by everyone, but the service has its own audience.

The opinion that this is a service for alcoholics is deceptive. The service is used mainly by people close to the Internet aged 20 to 35 years, geeks, users of other tracker services. By the way, the average active user of the service drinks an average of 12 liters of absolute alcohol per year, which is about one and a half times less than the Rosstat estimate in Russia (18 liters).

Interestingly, the attempt to show the service in various forums devoted to problems with alcohol failed, where the service was considered an evil.

Hosting

Hosted in the cloud RackSpace (CloudSites). There were no downtimes and interruptions in the site. It works stably. The main task is not to think about hosting at all, and that everything works, it’s done.

Monetization: advertising on the site

I tried to advertise both Google Adsense and Yandex.Direct on the pages of the site. The effect is approximately the same no. For all the time, it earned about $ 120. At the same time, more than a thousand were spent on hosting (it costs $ 150 per month). The plans are to completely abandon search engine contextual advertising and implement their targeted advertising engine.

Monetization: Premium accounts

were presented in September, and since then only 65 premium accounts have been sold (premium costs 270 rubles for one year). Of course, this does not yet cover the costs of the service, but much more than the effect of contextual advertising.
Now it’s obvious that the current implementation of premium accounts is temporary. We plan to introduce alternative payment for opening new functions by micropayments.

Fresh traffic

After the habraeffect has passed, visitor statistics have tended to slow but constant decline. “Word of mouth”, which I really wanted, after the first announcement there was some time, but then it ended. There is some talk about the service, but no more. The functionality that allows the service to become not “closed in itself” (data export, badges, etc.) is not implemented. There are certain expectations from these new features. We will see.

Social applications

He had high hopes for applications for social networks and made applications for VKontakte and Facebook. The ease of getting new visitors to the application through the internal targeted advertising was captivating. In general, the application’s ads were quite effective. For example, in Vkontakte, about a thousand dollars were spent on advertising, this gave about 20 thousand application installations and formed the current permanent audience of the application (about 500-600 visitors every day). I wrote a little more about the advertising experience on my blog. Virus distribution of the application is not observed - it was naive to count on it (I will not hide - it was).

The main problem is that users of social services are not yet converted into money, so while all advertising activities are suspended. So, for example, almost all (90%) of premium accounts are bought by users of the site, but nothing on the social network. Obviously, a different approach is needed in social networks: you need to let the character grow, compete with other users, sell all sorts of skills, “+1 to strength”, etc. (A smile is needed here.) Unfortunately, this does not apply to YesterdayMe, but there are some plans to improve the monetization model (again, reducing it to atomic micropayments).

Other applications

In addition to social applications, there are others: a gadget for the Windows sidebar, a widget for the Mac pop-up, and a widget for Yandex. (All current applications can be viewed here: www.yesterdayme.ru/apps )

Desktop widgets are gaining new users very slowly, but it’s worth noting the widget for Yandex separately - I did it just for the weekend, and today it has more daily openings than the application for VKontakte. Of course, this widget is basically only opening, but not so often used, but there has been a steady increase in its settings every day.

Investments

Not involved and not yet planned. The project is developed exclusively at its own expense. (I’m doing the YesterdayMe project in extra time, my main job is WebAsyst and Shop-Script .)

Team

Until October, he was engaged in a project alone. Now there are already two of us in the team - a developer has appeared who is responsible for the entire technical part of the project. We share the tasks, and the development process went faster and more pleasant.

Community

Treasure those who are ready to monitor your project. Do not just use it, but follow it. Gathering such an audience is one of the key tasks. The audience is spreading your news, not you. Create and value this audience - you will grow from a startup to a profitable project.

Future plans

Generally speaking, plans are huge (yes, which startup is wrong). The first version is almost always a prototype. In the case of YesterdayMe, this is also partly true. Something is planned to be rewritten, to make closer integration of the site, social applications, an open API, full-fledged clients for iPhone, iPad and other devices.

Versioning Inside

Just some advice on the internal structure of the code: keep the system versioned when updating. We have this: a single entry point index.php and connecting all the code from the v #### folder (php, js, css - everything is inside). When updating, simply fill in the new folder next to it and reconfigure the path. When meta-updates are infrequent, such a method is just fine - a particularly pleasant feeling of how simple and working the solution is. Neither browser caches, nor downtimes when updating, you can roll back, if that. Recommend! Saves a ton of time.

General recommendation

To fantasize more before doing. It is to fantasize, and not to start designing. The first task is to see how you should ideally do what you’re going to, as% your_lover_ company% would do. Then it is already possible to proceed to design, separation into stages, design and implementation. Having imagined something new, do not rush to proceed - most likely, there is some sensible thought very close by, which you will immediately miss, delving into the details.

If interested, ask questions or indicate a direction about which more to tell. Thanks for attention.