SmartProgress. A successful start history and our promotion experience
2 months ago we launched a beta version of our project ( post on Habré ), which received good feedback 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 the project in the network.
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I have always believed that start-up projects should be brought to perfection, and only then can they be launched into a long voyage. The ReWork book from the 37signals founders changed my mind about this. A large part of the book told that “licking” the project is not at all necessary, and even contraindicated. Real users who have tried the raw product themselves will tell in which direction to develop the project. So in the end it turned out - at first many mistakes and inaccuracies came out that we ruled on the fly, then people began to publish their wishes, many ideas emerged in our work. Now a development plan has been drawn up for the project to increase the functionality, and much of what will be implemented has not even been conceived from the very beginning. All this confirms the fact that the most important thing in the project is the launch of the main working version, improvements and finishing - only after receiving the feedback from the first users.
So, the first 2 weeks we went to the corrections. In parallel, we have been promoting the project in the network. We had little experience in this matter, so things were going quite slowly.
We started with the simplest and most obvious - from forums and blogs. We tried not only to spam (we did not use automatic mailings and bots), but to engage in a dialogue with users, we wanted to convey the essence of the project to those who could be interested in any way.
The most popular forums of the network with the highest attendance were affected, only about 10 large sites. The result - a lot of forces were spent (registration, posting, communication with the forum users), practically no result. From all sites about 300 visitors combined. There was a feeling that the forums are dying out mostly as a format. Regulars who sit there, the conservatives to the depth of the bones and feedback from them can not wait.
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 received no answer. “Standard situation” - we thought and safely forgot about them. A week later (maybe a little less), “Metric” begins to go off-scale — suddenly, unexpectedly, a post on lifhacker appeared, which brought us very high-quality traffic, the percentage of failures was minimal, which was very pleasing.
On this free cheese over. Then came the personal investment.
Yandex.Direct - I picked up low-frequency queries, trying to reduce the cost of a click, but on average it was about 20-30 cents, the traffic came in quality, but at this stage it seemed expensive to us. If the keywords were selected less competitive, the traffic became ineffective, the percentage of failures increased several times.
Blog Advertising on Twitter was the cheapest, but also the most ineffective. Blogs yielded results, but also small, until the campaign was stopped.
Vkontakte groups were surprisingly a good way to tell people about the project. On average, groups of about a million people take about 2000 p. for the post with a link to the site and 1500 with a link to a group in the VC. They have such rules - the post hangs for a day, exactly after 24 hours they remove it. Since they did not post in any entertainment groups, but thematic ones, the traffic was of high quality.
Now comes targeted advertising in the VC , which is bearing fruit.
According to statistics, the service is inhabited by 75% of men and 25% of women.
90% of users are between 18 and 35 years old.
Already, about 7,000 people have registered on our website. But it is necessary to take into account 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 main features of the site, and then is deleted.
Over time, we began to notice that the service had outgrown even our expectations, if initially it was just a site for publishing our goals and communication between users, now new horizons are opening up. Some participants find people with similar goals and unite to help each other, for example, in moving to another country, others find like-minded people in their project, and others - business partners. Also investors who looked for interesting projects with us were noticed.
Since the launch, we have changed a lot in the project, made it more friendly, but do not intend to stop there. This is only the main part of the changes and innovations that occurred in 2 months:
1) Launched the English version of the site.
2) Changed the main page goals. In addition to design, the presentation of goals has also changed. Now we divide the goals into "Interesting" and "Everything." Objectives that have an extensive description and are divided into stages fall into the “Interesting” category; besides, such goals should be of public interest, while “All” has a general flow of goals. In addition, we are constantly moderating and cleaning branches from test targets, advertising messages and various kinds of garbage.
3) Added the ability to write conclusions to goals. Conclusions - this is the result of all your work.
4) Added a list of users page and a list of subscriptions to the goals that you are interested.
5) Changed and added to the page editing goals, now all stages are easily reversed and deleted.
6) We paid a lot of attention to social networks. Now on the site you can register through the popular social networks, at the request of many users have introduced the function "share with friends."
In general, the potential of the project opens up great. Judge for yourself - on what other site do people tear off their life goals and dreams to you, share the progress of their work projects publicly. If, for example, people can search for business partners on the freelance exchange simply by posting a message, then you can keep your project publicly available (publish the progress of the goal), and if it is really interesting, then the people themselves will become interested in it.
If you do not want to share your goal with everyone, not a problem, you can make it private and follow your progress yourself, keeping all the information about your goal in one place.
We will be glad to 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 the project in the network.
')
Launch
I have always believed that start-up projects should be brought to perfection, and only then can they be launched into a long voyage. The ReWork book from the 37signals founders changed my mind about this. A large part of the book told that “licking” the project is not at all necessary, and even contraindicated. Real users who have tried the raw product themselves will tell in which direction to develop the project. So in the end it turned out - at first many mistakes and inaccuracies came out that we ruled on the fly, then people began to publish their wishes, many ideas emerged in our work. Now a development plan has been drawn up for the project to increase the functionality, and much of what will be implemented has not even been conceived from the very beginning. All this confirms the fact that the most important thing in the project is the launch of the main working version, improvements and finishing - only after receiving the feedback from the first users.
Promotion
So, the first 2 weeks we went to the corrections. In parallel, we have been promoting the project in the network. We had little experience in this matter, so things were going quite slowly.
We started with the simplest and most obvious - from forums and blogs. We tried not only to spam (we did not use automatic mailings and bots), but to engage in a dialogue with users, we wanted to convey the essence of the project to those who could be interested in any way.
The most popular forums of the network with the highest attendance were affected, only about 10 large sites. The result - a lot of forces were spent (registration, posting, communication with the forum users), practically no result. From all sites about 300 visitors combined. There was a feeling that the forums are dying out mostly as a format. Regulars who sit there, the conservatives to the depth of the bones and feedback from them can not wait.
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 received no answer. “Standard situation” - we thought and safely forgot about them. A week later (maybe a little less), “Metric” begins to go off-scale — suddenly, unexpectedly, a post on lifhacker appeared, which brought us very high-quality traffic, the percentage of failures was minimal, which was very pleasing.
On this free cheese over. Then came the personal investment.
Yandex.Direct - I picked up low-frequency queries, trying to reduce the cost of a click, but on average it was about 20-30 cents, the traffic came in quality, but at this stage it seemed expensive to us. If the keywords were selected less competitive, the traffic became ineffective, the percentage of failures increased several times.
Blog Advertising on Twitter was the cheapest, but also the most ineffective. Blogs yielded results, but also small, until the campaign was stopped.
Vkontakte groups were surprisingly a good way to tell people about the project. On average, groups of about a million people take about 2000 p. for the post with a link to the site and 1500 with a link to a group in the VC. They have such rules - the post hangs for a day, exactly after 24 hours they remove it. Since they did not post in any entertainment groups, but thematic ones, the traffic was of high quality.
Now comes targeted advertising in the VC , which is bearing fruit.
Figures and awareness
According to statistics, the service is inhabited by 75% of men and 25% of women.
90% of users are between 18 and 35 years old.
Already, about 7,000 people have registered on our website. But it is necessary to take into account 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 main features of the site, and then is deleted.
Over time, we began to notice that the service had outgrown even our expectations, if initially it was just a site for publishing our goals and communication between users, now new horizons are opening up. Some participants find people with similar goals and unite to help each other, for example, in moving to another country, others find like-minded people in their project, and others - business partners. Also investors who looked for interesting projects with us were noticed.
Scope of work
Since the launch, we have changed a lot in the project, made it more friendly, but do not intend to stop there. This is only the main part of the changes and innovations that occurred in 2 months:
1) Launched the English version of the site.
2) Changed the main page goals. In addition to design, the presentation of goals has also changed. Now we divide the goals into "Interesting" and "Everything." Objectives that have an extensive description and are divided into stages fall into the “Interesting” category; besides, such goals should be of public interest, while “All” has a general flow of goals. In addition, we are constantly moderating and cleaning branches from test targets, advertising messages and various kinds of garbage.
3) Added the ability to write conclusions to goals. Conclusions - this is the result of all your work.
4) Added a list of users page and a list of subscriptions to the goals that you are interested.
5) Changed and added to the page editing goals, now all stages are easily reversed and deleted.
6) We paid a lot of attention to social networks. Now on the site you can register through the popular social networks, at the request of many users have introduced the function "share with friends."
findings
In general, the potential of the project opens up great. Judge for yourself - on what other site do people tear off their life goals and dreams to you, share the progress of their work projects publicly. If, for example, people can search for business partners on the freelance exchange simply by posting a message, then you can keep your project publicly available (publish the progress of the goal), and if it is really interesting, then the people themselves will become interested in it.
If you do not want to share your goal with everyone, not a problem, you can make it private and follow your progress yourself, keeping all the information about your goal in one place.
We will be glad to new friends and progressive people who achieve their goals.
SmartProgress. Achievements of goals
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/159253/
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