Hi, Habrahabr!

    Hi, Habrahabr! Today, the Business Development Group company is turning from Habré readers to its writers. We have accumulated so much knowledge and skills, conducted so many experiments with our projects, we have succeeded and failed so much that there is no more strength to remain silent. We will talk about this in our blog.

    Perhaps the first couple of posts should be devoted to our projects. After all, everything that we know and can do, we got by developing and promoting them. Let's start with our largest, most famous, most beloved, most-most project - Voicecards.ru . This is a service for sending voice cards to mobile phones to friends and acquaintances.

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    How it works
    If you remember, during the boom of mobile content in 2006-2007. operators launched on IVR such a service - voice cards. Users called a short number, listened for a long time to voice messages and sent what they chose to a friend’s number. We liked voice cards - from them we got funny phone pranks and unusual birthday greetings, but using the service was very inconvenient and expensive.

    Therefore, in 2007 we created such a service on the web. Everything is the same only in a convenient interface. You select a card from the catalog (and you can choose for a long time, listening to voice greetings at least a thousand times), enter the recipient's number and delivery time and you're done - the card is delivered to a friend like a regular phone call. To pay for the service, we connected SMS billing to VoiceCards, one card costs about 80 rubles.

    How the project has changed during its existence
    The essence of the service is probably the only thing that has not changed over the years. We love this project so much and think so much about it that we constantly want to finish and remake something.

    At VoiceCards, we managed to:
    • once seriously alter the interface after usability testing;
    • to fasten a lot of different chips and fixtures (for example, the user's office with tracking delivery of cards or the ability to record cards yourself );
    • record a lot of very different voice content (we even have a call from Cheburashka from the Land of Tales );
    • create special projects for major holidays ( Snowcards.ru - voice cards for the New Year);
    • launch an affiliate program for website owners and postcard recording studios;
    • to develop a java application for mobile VoiceCards Mobile and an application for Vkontakte;
    • make versions of the site in English and German under the Mobinton brand
    We will certainly tell you about some of the most interesting experiments in separate posts.

    Where do we find users
    ? We have always been paying attention to promotion, because this is how we make money on our project. VoiceCards is a mass service with a low cost of service, and our goal has always been to attract inexpensive, mass, well convertible traffic.

    How many times did we sit at conferences or sections devoted to online advertising, and with tears in our eyes listened to reports of people telling about the effectiveness of advertising cars or even plastic windows (and the cost of a voice card = 80 rubles), about the appearance of new platforms that would attract users not more expensive than 10 rubles (and for us, 1 ruble is already expensive ...). We were ready right now to spend an advertising budget of 1 million rubles, if for this money we would get 2 million users, the necessary part of which would be bought by voice card. But little is said about such a promotion at conferences ...

    Therefore, we have accumulated all the experience in promoting VoiceCards ourselves. Now we have about 20 thousand users on a typical day and up to 100 thousand users on holidays, not counting the users of partner sites that sell our voice cards.

    Buying traffic, contextual advertising, SEO, teasers in a variety of advertising networks, news traffic, affiliate programs, social networks - we have tried a lot and about traffic sources you can also write a separate post. A tale about how we attracted traffic and analyzed it :)

    What are we proud of?
    They say that such headings should not be written on Habré, because they are too pathetic. But there are a couple of things related to VoiceCards, from which we are so enthusiastic that we constantly tell all our friends :)
    For example, the number of “voice card” requests in Yandex has grown 25 times over the life of the project. This means that we have formed a market, albeit a small one, but a market with our own goods, buyers and sellers (yes, we have competitors :))

    In creating content, we started with parodies of famous politicians and television heroes, but now we have voice cards in the recordings of which were attended by real celebrities - the group Mumiy Troll , Hands up , T9 , the actors of the series Daddy’s daughters and Don’t be born beautiful .

    And on the site itself, we most like the section "Live". It is absolutely useless for users, but if you click on the link "Show on the map"- on the world map on-line cards will appear that are sent by our users. When you get very tired at work, and it seems that it will not work out better, you open this card, and there - “Honey, get well soon” sent at 15:39 to the subscriber Tele2, Kostroma; “The conspiracy from drunkenness” was sent at 15:39 to the subscriber Megafon, St. Petersburg; "Nastya, congratulations!" sent at 15:41 to an MTS subscriber, Chelyabinsk ... And your mood is improving :)

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    PS Most of all, our friends were delighted with this blog, to whom we are constantly trying to tell something about our projects, experiments and ideas. Do not worry, dear ones and loved ones, now we will talk exclusively with non-working topics with you :)

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