YesterdayMe: startup growth experience from 1 to 2000 active users

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

YesterdayMe - a service that allows you to monitor the use of alcohol. Drank - recorded. On the entered data different reports are under construction. Initially, the idea was to make only a personal tracker drunk, 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 performance.

Today, the service has about two thousand active users (use the service at least once a week).
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Start

Start was given on April 16, 2010 by the announcement on Habré. Habraeffekt was easily sustained, and with it service had the first real users. 450 people (out of two thousand) - from the moment of the first announcement to this day. Thanks, Habr!

The project, design and coding began in January 2010, that is, the preparatory preparation was about 3 months. Maximum limited task, so as not to delay the release.

Did the idea go?

Gone. Of course, the service does not claim 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 mainly used by people close to the Internet from the age of 20 to 35, geeks, users of other tracker services. By the way, the average active user of the service drinks on average 12 liters of absolute alcohol per year, which is about one and a half times less than the Rostat estimate in Russia (18 liters).

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

Hosting

Hosted in the cloud RackSpace (CloudSites). There were no downtimes and interruptions in the work of the site. It works stably. The main task - not to think about hosting at all, and for everything to work - to be completed.

Monetization: advertising on the site

I tried to place on the pages of the site advertising and Google AdSense, and Yandex.Direct. The effect is about 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). There are plans to completely abandon contextual advertising of search engines and implement their own 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 service, but much more than the effect of contextual advertising.
Now it is obvious that the current implementation of premium accounts is temporary. We plan to introduce an alternative payment for the discovery of new functions by micropayments.

"Fresh" traffic

After a habraeffekt passed, the statistics of visitors took a tendency to slow, but continuous decrease. “Word of mouth”, which was very desirable, was some time after the first announcement, 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.) has not been implemented. There are certain expectations from these new features. We'll 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 due to the internal targeted advertising was appealing. In general, advertising applications have been quite effective. For example, in Vkontakte about a thousand dollars was spent on advertising, it gave about 20 thousand installations of the application and formed the current permanent audience of the application (about 500-600 visitors every day). A little more about the experience of advertising, I wrote in my blog. Viral distribution of the application is not observed - it was naive to rely on it (I will not hide it - it was).

The main problem is that users of social applications are not yet converted into money, so for now all advertising activities have been suspended. For example, almost all (90%) premium accounts are purchased by site users, and 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 smiley is needed here.) Unfortunately, this is not applicable to YesterdayMe, but there are some plans to improve the monetization model (again, reducing to atomic micropayments).

Other applications

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

Desktop widgets are very slowly recruiting new users, but the widget for Yandex is particularly worth mentioning - I made it just for the weekend, and today it has more daily discoveries than the application for Vkontakte. Of course, this widget basically only opens, but is not so often used, but there is a steady increase in its settings from day to day.

Investments

Not involved and not yet planned. The project is developed exclusively on its own funds. (I do the YesterdayMe project in extra time, my main work is WebAsyst and Shop-Script .)

Team

Until October I was engaged in the 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 pleasantly.

Community

Treasure those who are willing to follow your project. Do not just use it, but follow it. To gather such an audience is one of the key tasks. The audience spreads your news, not you. Create and cherish this audience - grow from a startup into 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 a closer integration of the site, social applications, open API, full-fledged clients for iPhone, Aipad and other devices.

Versioned inside

Just a tip about the internal structure of the code: have a versioned code version when updating. We have this: a single entry point index.php and the connection of all the code from the folder v #### (php, js, css - everything is inside). When updating, simply upload a new folder nearby and reconfigure the path. When meta-updates are infrequent, this method is simply beautiful - a particularly pleasant feeling of how simple and workable the solution is. Neither your browser caches, nor downtime when updating, you can roll back, if that. Recommend! Saves a lot of time.

General recommendation

More fantasy before doing. It is to fantasize, and not to start designing. The first task is to see how you need to do, ideally, what you are going to do, as your% favorite_company% would do. Then you can proceed to the design, division into stages, design and implementation. Having imagined something new, do not rush to start - most likely, there is still some practical thought very close, which you will immediately miss by going into details.

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