I was going to write this later, but I saw Paul Stamatiou’s post on HN, and figured I’ll give the other perspective.
Disclaimer for our users, this is written for the guys at HN, so it will cover things regular folks could care less about.
Style Guidance is a site that is meant to cover all those topics that have to do with style and beauty. Deep down it’s “just a Q&A” site, but we are also delving into the social shopping bit, by helping users find the specific fashion items that they are searching for.
The official launch of Style Guidance was November 18th. And by all measures it pretty much sucked. I wasn’t too surprised or worried by the results, since that was more or less what I expected.
Bloggers
The big problem was blog audience. Tech blogs tend to focus on sites that have already been validated. Got funding? Got some star members? You’ll probably get coverage. While everyone else has to prove themselves first(well 99.99% of the cases). And let’s be honest, the site doesn’t really fit in with the tech community. We did get an interview with Venture Beat, but that didn’t result in a Venture Beat story. The plus side from that, is that it gave validation that the idea has some merit.
For those of you wondering about interview questions from venture beat, it was the usual(i assume). How are you making money, how many users you have, who are your competitors, who are you(niche bonafides that will give you the upper hand), what funding do you have, etc. This was my first actual interview, so I was a little bit nervous, and forgot to mention a couple of things. But hey, we all gotta start somewhere.
And fashion blogs? Well most of them tend to cover..you guessed it…actual fashion or photos of models, so not much luck there.
Results
We pretty much fell through the cracks. Don’t get me wrong…we did get some coverage. About 10 or so posts to be exact. But those were secondary and tertiary blogs, and the traffic from those has been minimal. Like 10 people on launch day from a blog with 50,000 monthly visitors.
Even in Paul’s report, who had a successful launch, he only got 18,000 hits from all those blogs he got coverage in. And Techcrunch alone has over 7.5 million monthly uniques. So don’t bet the farm on launch day.
So looking back, the week it took to assemble the list of bloggers, and to email all of them has been a huge waste of time. At least based no results. You probably still need to do it, on the offchance that you get some coverage, but that’s a huge time sacrifice, when you can’t really afford it.
We need a list
Looking back…you know what would be nice? If someone assembled a list of all the blogs with all the contact information. You can even charge $100 for the list, and trust me, most people will pay it, rather than spend a week tracking down all the blog’s contact information.
My second press release, went out in just 4 hours, why? Because I didn’t have to track down all that information again.
Problems?
Nope, server didn’t catch fire, DNS didn’t get dropped, everything went off smoothly. Which brings me to lesson #1, don’t waste time optimizing until you need it.
Anyways, you probably came here for data.
The Data
Pre-Launch:
By Pre-Launch I count the week just prior to launch. At that point we had a massive usage of 30-60 users per day. On Monday I started sending out emails to all those bloggers. But there was no impact until Tuesday, when we got hit with 219 visitors, and since we didn’t change anything, that’s ~150 or so bloggers coming to check the site out.
Launch:
The launch day was a fizzle. Here are the stats.
- Uniques: 502
- New Active Users: 32(active being a user who registered and asked/answered a question)
- Page Views: 2,563
- Bounce Rate: 47%
- Traffic: 27% Direct, 72% Referral.
- Sources: Top 3: 29% from reddit, 28% direct, 11% HN)
- Ads: I threw some money into Facebook and Adwords, but there was very little effect.
Post Launch
Post launch would be the few days just after the launch. But there was a stay in traffic. We started off with 30-60 users a day, and went up to 100-150 users a day post launch.
Lessons learned?
- If you are not sure if your site fits 100% with a blog’s topic, it’s probably not even worth bothering to email, since even if you do get covered, you’ll only get a few clicks.
- Don’t put any emphasis on the launch. Chances are you won’t get much coverage, so worrying too much about what day to contact the press or what day to launch is just a waste of time.
- Wait more in private beta, wait until you have a decent amount of traffic, that you can show to the blogs, to validate yourself.
The Month After
Even though the launch was an epic failure, the actual fact of acknowledging your launch gets you into a different kind of mindset. So for the past month, of being launched we’ve hit 12,500 New Visitors, and we now get about 700-800 visitors per day. We are up to 805 contributors(anyone who asked/answered a question) and up to 627 Questions(content). We are now getting 100-150 visitors a day, just from Google alone, and that number is slowly growing every day.
The Google # is very important, since it means we are starting to rank high in results for all the content our users are throwing up. And those results = new potential users coming to the site for free.
So basically the point for this blog post, is that even if your launch sucks, it doesn’t mean you give up and go home. This is a marathon, not a sprint. All sites start out slow, especially if you are self-funded. So just give it time, and before you know it, you’ll be hitting respectable traffic numbers.
P.S. Sorry about the lack of comments(didn’t get around to installing them), so just post on HN.
