How we searched for the first users and what Artemy Lebedev was wrong about

After several months of not very successful (due to our fault) work with freelancers, we had a working but sooo raw product. Exercises with cheap freelancers did not want to continue, and we decided to bring the product to mind with our own resources.
Since nobody canceled the main work here, we had to enter a hobby in the remaining time. At 5:30 in the morning I went home to my partner and in the small room at the two tables we did our dirty business. Sergey showed me the basic things of form programming, and he was engaged in fine-tuning the main functionality. Worked usually hours to 9 and went to the office. Sometimes they met in the evenings and almost always worked on weekends.
In this mode, it took 2-3 months. There was a complete conviction that there was no light at the end of the tunnel, and the early ascents would stop all craving for entrepreneurship.

It is working!

We didn’t have any test cases at that moment, and we just drove tasks and messages back and forth during the working day. It is hard to describe the euphoria when a difficult operation completes successfully. For us, such operations were: job creation, candidate approval, and confirmation of completion. It’s crooked, but it worked at one point, and it was beautiful. The light at the end of the tunnel dawned, and we rushed towards it.

Need a release

We really wanted to make the first release, and it was unimportant that something was not working. It was about 10-11 months of our work on the project and without a positive reaction from the market, we would not last long. The system allowed to create and confirm tasks, and this seemed to be enough. The preparation of the first release is something like the repair of Zhvanetsky: “repair cannot be finished at all, it can only be stopped”.
In the end, I shoved our program into the installer, Sergei put the istarler on the site, and it began. An expectation began, which, of course, could not end with anything good, because marketing as a class did not exist.

200 fake users

Before the start of the public life of our project, we decided to wind up our public meters a little. At the main one at that time, we showed the number of registered users, the number of tasks completed per day and the total number of tasks completed. We set this block specifically to attract new users with good performance. And while there were no good ones, they were worth coming up with. We registered 2 or 3 hundreds of users, created several hundred tasks and every day tried to do at least a couple of tasks in order to create some sort of activity.
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First advertisement

I do not remember where, but we have a list of emails of users who were registered in the boxes. A list of about 10t addresses. We thought that if people were ready to browse other sites for money, they might be interested in working at WORKZILLA as personal assistants. This assumption was quite logical, especially considering that we had no other ideas for promotion.
We compiled a sales letter for all the canons of online sales and decided to send it to this list. Here we were waited by the first failure - it was impossible to send more than 100 addresses. Surprisingly, Google classified our letters as SPAM. It didn’t stop us at all, and we started sending out about 200-300 letters per day from several addresses.

First users

After sending advertising letters, we did nothing but update our main one, where registration statistics were shown.
Hooray! There is a first registration! Hurray, there is the first client installation, as seen by the number of users online.
We urgently look in the database, which categories the first user specified, and post the task based on his choice. We post a deliberately simple and rather expensive task, so that he necessarily agrees. The task was "Find exercises for football." Candidate approved, we are waiting again. A few hours later, we are sent a list of football exercises.
Afigeget, really works!

Artemy Lebedev forecast was not justified

That summer the “Designer of All Russia” organized UkrEtnoExpo and periodically interviewed the public on free topics on mobile. On one of these days, I called him and told him about our then just-emerging project. tema as a whole approved the idea, he only doubted that people would be ready to work. In his opinion, our people do not like to work very much and this may threaten the existence of our service.

Already in the first days we realized that this would not be a problem. Those wishing to earn much more than willing to pay for services. The ratio was about 1 to 9. That is, there was only one customer for 9 performers.
This, of course, does not mean that all 9 performers will work well and meet the requirements, but it means that there is a choice and selection will allow to select high-quality performers, without which no Personal Assistant will be able to work.

Happiness would be incomplete without money

The WORKZILLA monetization model implies a certain amount of virtual banknotes in users' accounts, without which even numerous registrations cannot be considered a success.
The WebMoney wallet, to which the payment was connected, makes a pleasant ringing of coins when money comes to it. Even at night, my partner put the sound on his computer to the maximum, so as not to miss this event. And once it took place, it took place at night. Time on the clock did not stop us, and he called me to tell this good news.
The first amount we received was 6p. Their owner wanted to find artists who would go to his site and click on ads from Google.
Unfortunately, he could not find the artist and he did not become our regular user.

Double marketing

It was very disappointing when that one, 1 out of 10, customer appeared in the system and placed the task for his hard-earned money, but no one took it up. Without tears, it was impossible to observe. We ourselves were even ready to carry out the tasks, so that the customer was satisfied and came back again. A couple of times we really did and thought that in the extreme case we could earn not as creators, but at least as performers.
Here lies the main marketing complexity of the WORKZILLA project. The so-called double marketing. The idea is that the site must attract two groups of users, and they must be attracted simultaneously. One group of users are performers who are willing to do the work. The other is customers who are willing to entrust tasks and are willing to pay for it.
If performers are out of work for a long time, they leave. If the work of the customer no one does, he will not return. It is necessary to ensure that both of these groups are presented simultaneously and in sufficient quantities.

Hang out on freelance

One of the marketing finds for us would be to find employees on freelancing. There you could buy premium placement of your project, when it hangs on the main one and has its own banner. We were always looking for a Delphi programmer, so quite often we kept our ads there. The ad worked as an advertisement because it had our banner that led to our landing page, and hung on the main freelance. On good days, due to such an announcement, we registered 70-80 people.

The first mention in offline media

Approximately three months after the public launch, we received a letter from an expert publishing house employee.
We wanted to interview us about our service. At first we did not believe it and thought it was some kind of divorce. But when they made sure, they began to paint in our dreams pictures of our success after publication. It is necessary to understand that at that moment our service didn’t represent anything at all, and the Expert already writes about us! True publication was planned not in the Expert itself, but in the journal D` (D-stroke). The text of the publication.
We waited for the explosive effect on attendance, but did not notice anything at all. This is again taking into account the fact that our service at that time practically did not work and no more than 100 users visited the site per day. Even with such attendance, we did not notice the effect. There was no limit to frustration. Later there were other publications in various offline journals, and this result was repeated again and again. Whether our topic is not interesting to offline readers, or offline readers are not interested in online.

Workspace to be

It is clear that after the first release a lot of questions have been opened, the main one is: what to do with double marketing and in general, where to take Customers. But the release took place, people registered, downloaded and installed the program and even sometimes tried to order something. The project began its life and no longer stopped.
After that there were hard years of difficult improvements and improvements, which took place against the background of various marketing experiments.

PS

With this post we continue a series of publications where we want to share the experience gained during the creation and work on the project WORKZILLA.RU. Previous articles:
- How to come up with an idea for your project (using the example of WORKZILLA)
- How we chose hosting
- How we learned to work with freelancers
- Bulk email distribution using Amazon SES

We do not pretend to omniscience and universal genius, but we want to tell you about our mistakes and findings - they can be useful to someone.

Sample list of future non-technical articles:
- What were our difficulties and how not to give up
- Business plan and quasi investors
- Remote work of the whole team
- Events of startups

Sample list of future technical articles:
- Preparing for a mass advertising campaign with JMeter
- DR - how we solve the problem of force majeure.
- More about backups
- Service monitoring with Munin, Nagios, etc.