I'm working on a blog post that'll probably provide some more (and different details) but here's our story:
Well, since we launched only a few months before, we were still a little scared as to how the site and service would scale (and how much our server bill would jump). So we wanted to grow kinda slowly so we could manage it effectively.
Our strategy then was to reach out to editors or writers of smaller sites that seemed like they were in our milieu, and see if any of them showed any interest. I think we contacted...30 or 40 editors.
We actually didn't get any coverage at all, which was really disheartening. But we kept plugging away on the site and the app, adding a couple additional features. In the meanwhile I kept sending out emails, filling out forms. Users kept trickling in.
We also started using our own app ourselves, sending out Momentomails to our friends and to each other. Making sure the service was live and validating the idea...building up expected user patterns, establishing acceptable levels of service quality...etc.
One thing we found slightly disturbing, was the large number of sites that offer different levels of review prioritization depending on if you email them and expect some free coverage, or if you pay them. And I suppose I can see how that could be an interesting revenue channel, but if I wanted to pay somebody to cover me, I'd probably just buy ad space...so it felt kinda scammish and we decided not to do that. Our service should either be interesting and useful on its own, or we should keep working on it until it is.
On a whim, I decided to send out a contact to some bigger sites, Lifehacker being one of them. Still nothing.
I'm not sure how much getting covered on Apr 1st hurt us or not (we answered a few user contacts answering if we were real or not). But we had a massive spike in new traffic. Massive. We couldn't even see some of our previous spikes on the graph it was so huge. We floated around the top 10 hot sites on LH for two or three days so the spike extended out for awhile.
So far, LH has been the only major site to cover us, but it's let us observe how things spread on the internet. If you search for Momentomail in google, you'll find dozens of pages where we show up, almost all reposts or links to LH's story. A few tweets bounced around the tweetosphere...(or whatever it's called)...and very interesting -- foreign translations of the LH post, showing up a few days later, sent us echos of the initial spike.
Suddenly a rush of Italian users, or Turkish users, or Indonesian users. We haven't gotten the metrics yet, but anecdotally, it looks like about 20% of our new signups are now coming from Spanish language countries...which is pretty exciting.
It's definitely slowed down, and we're still kind of processing all this new traffic, but there's a steady stream of new signups everyday. We've found a few bugs were squashing. Once we add a couple planned (and highly requested features) we'll probably go around and recontact many of the sites that we contacted before...but also the sites that carried our story from the initial Lifehacker story.
In case anybody is interested, some fun notes: we run on GAE, and we had our quota set to a cap of about $5/day, before the LH story, we'd barely even showed up on the quota data (we'd only been using the free service). The week of the LH story, the quotas showed some activity, but we never broke Google's free quota. So our hosting fees so far on GAE are $0. It's definitely a cost effective way to bootstrap a new product. (though secretly we hope to have to "good problem" of having to increase our quota cap).
Wow, great! Thanks for all of the details. Really helps to put things into perspective. Sounds like you're doing all the right things and hustling away.
The reason I'm curious is because I "launched" my first web app a few months ago. In actuality it was just a feeler to see how the product faired in the wild - core functionality was there, but greatly lacking features. The only place I shared was HN and it was received tremendously well. It hung out on the front page for the majority of the day, resulted in thousands of hits and hundreds of signups, with more trickling in during the weeks following. At the time, I was reluctant to promote anywhere else before incorporating a few new features. Unfortunately, I was pulled away by more demanding projects, so I haven't had time to make all of the changes and features I had planned on (or marketing), resulting in significantly decreased traffic.
Now that my other projects are winding down, I can focus more time on building and promoting this app. Stories like yours help a bunch, so I appreciate the details.
Could I get your e-mail address? I'd love to stay in touch, but I don't see it anywhere in your profile.
Well, since we launched only a few months before, we were still a little scared as to how the site and service would scale (and how much our server bill would jump). So we wanted to grow kinda slowly so we could manage it effectively.
Our strategy then was to reach out to editors or writers of smaller sites that seemed like they were in our milieu, and see if any of them showed any interest. I think we contacted...30 or 40 editors.
We actually didn't get any coverage at all, which was really disheartening. But we kept plugging away on the site and the app, adding a couple additional features. In the meanwhile I kept sending out emails, filling out forms. Users kept trickling in.
We also started using our own app ourselves, sending out Momentomails to our friends and to each other. Making sure the service was live and validating the idea...building up expected user patterns, establishing acceptable levels of service quality...etc.
One thing we found slightly disturbing, was the large number of sites that offer different levels of review prioritization depending on if you email them and expect some free coverage, or if you pay them. And I suppose I can see how that could be an interesting revenue channel, but if I wanted to pay somebody to cover me, I'd probably just buy ad space...so it felt kinda scammish and we decided not to do that. Our service should either be interesting and useful on its own, or we should keep working on it until it is.
On a whim, I decided to send out a contact to some bigger sites, Lifehacker being one of them. Still nothing.
About two weeks after submitting to Lifehacker, this happened: http://lifehacker.com/#!5787941/momentomail-sends-messages-f...
I'm not sure how much getting covered on Apr 1st hurt us or not (we answered a few user contacts answering if we were real or not). But we had a massive spike in new traffic. Massive. We couldn't even see some of our previous spikes on the graph it was so huge. We floated around the top 10 hot sites on LH for two or three days so the spike extended out for awhile.
So far, LH has been the only major site to cover us, but it's let us observe how things spread on the internet. If you search for Momentomail in google, you'll find dozens of pages where we show up, almost all reposts or links to LH's story. A few tweets bounced around the tweetosphere...(or whatever it's called)...and very interesting -- foreign translations of the LH post, showing up a few days later, sent us echos of the initial spike.
Suddenly a rush of Italian users, or Turkish users, or Indonesian users. We haven't gotten the metrics yet, but anecdotally, it looks like about 20% of our new signups are now coming from Spanish language countries...which is pretty exciting.
It's definitely slowed down, and we're still kind of processing all this new traffic, but there's a steady stream of new signups everyday. We've found a few bugs were squashing. Once we add a couple planned (and highly requested features) we'll probably go around and recontact many of the sites that we contacted before...but also the sites that carried our story from the initial Lifehacker story.
In case anybody is interested, some fun notes: we run on GAE, and we had our quota set to a cap of about $5/day, before the LH story, we'd barely even showed up on the quota data (we'd only been using the free service). The week of the LH story, the quotas showed some activity, but we never broke Google's free quota. So our hosting fees so far on GAE are $0. It's definitely a cost effective way to bootstrap a new product. (though secretly we hope to have to "good problem" of having to increase our quota cap).