

Never Launch, Just Iterate - spencerfry
http://www.marketing.fm/2009/11/17/never-launch-just-iterate/

======
jacquesm
That's actually _really_ good advice. If you do use the press and other media
be prepared for a let-down, all that stuff is only a momentary impulse, and
unless you are extremely sticky you are not going to get much out of it.

Satisfied, returning users is the only way to really grow a business, it's
easy to see why:

Even if everybody in the world came by tomorrow but nobody got stuck you'd be
looking at 0 traffic on Friday next week, but if instead of that you'd have
1000 new users each day of which 10% got stuck you'd have _at least_ 2,000
visitors per day by Friday next week.

Now 2,000 visitors per day doesn't sound like it is much but depending on the
product you might already be in the 'black' at that level. And if not, wait 90
days...

In practice it is a lot harder to get people to come again to your site than
it is to get random individuals to come just once.

I remember coming across google the first time and instantly changing my
homepage from 'altavista' to 'google'.

That's all it took, it simply worked and worked so much better that there
would have been no reason to draw out the switching process.

~~~
vaksel
How exactly do you plan on getting 1,000 new visitors every day, without a big
media blitz for them to start hearing about your site? Sure you could buy ads,
but you'll probably end up spending a thousand bucks per day just to get that
1,000 users.

And if you want 1,000 new people per day organically, you pretty much need
200-300K users for them to tell their friends about you.

A big media launch will put you on the map, sure only a tiny portion of users
will stick around, but those few will give you that starting base to jump off
from.

I don't see why that 10% stickiness you talk about, wouldn't also work during
a launch. Sure you'll probably get a lot more lookie loos, but surely you'll
reach a wider audience.

I'm actually doing a "launch" tomorrow, Hopefully I'll get some coverage, and
if it's nothing but lookie loos, I can always go to doing the X users per day
thing.

~~~
jacquesm
Give me your URL and I'll get you some links.

As for 1,000 people per day costing you a thousand bucks, you're doing
something wrong there. 30K per month gets you at least half a million uniques
per month in a competitive market, but you'll have to do your own 'buys', not
go through a middle man.

A big media launch will get you most likely about 10 to 15,000 users and
you'll drop to about 100 or so after one week. You don't have to believe me of
course, but I've been there and done that several times now, the pattern for
me so far has been fairly consistent.

People that come from a newsfeed are usually not actively looking for what you
are offering just moderately curious.

The time you get them to 'stick' is when they are really in need of what you
have to offer.

~~~
vaksel
awesome, thanks! it's <http://styleguidance.com> :) I've had very good
response from the alpha for it, and everyone seems to love it.

I'm going by the rate of return on ads I've seen in the past. Sure you get a
ton of clicks, but only a tiny portion actually registers. Way below that 10%
you've talked about.

No I trust you, I had a launch similar like that with another site. Had 60K
the first two days. 20K on day 3. Then it slowly dwindled down to 1000 users a
day. Those seem pretty loyal, but the problem was that it was a content site,
that was generated entirely by me, and it wasn't worth focusing all my energy
on something that brought in 2-3 bucks a day.

~~~
jacquesm
Ok, one link is up, let's see if you can 'catch' some of these visitors, will
do another one on a different site.

The text I gave the link is: "If you (or your significant other) want to look
your best"

If you want a different text let me know.

Ads are imho a waste of money unless you have a direct track between click and
sale and you can measure very accurately which dollars spent give you how much
worth of income.

~~~
vaksel
awesome thanks! yeah that text should work.

Agree fully on the ads, the only reason I spent any money, was because I had
some facebook and adwords credits. And since I'm not even running any ads
now(don't want to scare off users), there is no X in ads = X new
subscriptions.

Oh btw, I have the url fixer plugin for firefox, and it "fixed" your site to
www.com, happened like 3 times before I realized what was going on, you should
email that developer and tell him to whitelist your exact url. If that works,
you'll get a ton of extra traffic.

The guy behind that plugin is <http://www.chrisfinke.com/>

~~~
jacquesm
Thanks for that heads up, I never realized that, I sent him an email.

edit: ok, second link is also up, together that should get you about 3.5M
exposures per month, I'm really curious what it will do for you.

~~~
vaksel
no problem, good luck with that.

Actually I just checked out and www.com appears to be a domain
squatter(although he sells www.com email addresses, but there is no site),
maybe you could even convince him to change www.com to ww.com

~~~
jacquesm
I tried buying the domain of that guy years ago, he's not selling.

[envy] It is probably the best ROI anybody ever made. I wouldn't be selling if
I were in his shoes either, he gets 150K uniques daily on that domain without
lifting a finger. [/envy]

~~~
teej
It can't be -that- great. It's all junk traffic, so the CPMs probably suck. My
friend owns netflicks.com which redirects to Netflix with a referral link and
makes a bit more than www.com probably does.

~~~
jacquesm
At a conservative 1ct per click we're talking 1500 dollars per day here.

I'm not sure what your definition of 'not all that great is'.

As for your friend, he could lose that domain in a heartbeat if netflix set
their mind to it.

~~~
teej
I think your math is off. 150k daily uniques, at a conservative $0.01 CPM is
about $1.5 a day.

~~~
jacquesm
Sorry for not being more clear. If you had to go and _buy_ that kind of
traffic you'd end up paying $1500 per day, that is its value.

You can probably sell it for some multiple of that because 1ct per click is
ridiculously low.

So we're talking about at least half a million dollars per year here and
probably substantially more, 100% pure profit, near 0 expenses.

Here is a sample of the data of such a site:

<http://ww.com/adsense.png> , these pages have three adsense tags on them, two
with pretty good conversion, one a lot less (but still 3x better than the
'overal average' of all adsense tags that I run.

21,500 euros is roughly 30,000 dollars, 3 million impressions is also roughly
3 million uniques on sites like this, so figure dividide by 20 to get to 150K
uniques, which is just about 1500 dollars per day.

And that's _just_ adsense, you can bet that people that live of this stuff
tend to put a few more tags on those pages.

The CTRs are ridiculously high because the user doesn't have much choice, they
can either click an 'ad' or click 'back'.

Not a very honorable business model though, but then again, would you say no
to a free $0.5M per year ?

------
Alex3917
Clearly not all businesses lend themselves to iterating over time. For
example, if you started a restaurant and you opened it before you were able to
make good food, then your initial reviews would be bad so you'd crash and
burn.

Rather than starting with the statement "never launch, just iterate" it would
be better to start with the following question:

"Should I start a business that lends itself to iteration?"

That's an interesting question that's worth discussing. But as it stands this
post is the wrong answer to the wrong question. (Which also shows how you can
often catch sloppy thinking by making explicit the question that a statement
is answering, and diffing that with the question you should be asking.)

edit: I think the actual answer is that you should choose to start a business
that lends itself to iteration, but that's different than the advice given.
It's another case where the given advice is close enough to the truth that it
tends to work, but the underlying rule is still wrong.

~~~
patio11
_if you started a restaurant and you opened it before you were able to make
good food, then your initial reviews would be bad so you'd crash and burn_

At least one restaurant opened in your city last week. Of the set of
restaurants which opened in your city last week, one of them is last in the
alphabet. Without checking either what restaurants opened last week or what
the reviews say about them, what did the reviews say about that restaurant?

You should be so lucky as to have everyone know how bad you are.

~~~
Alex3917
"You should be so lucky as to have everyone know how bad you are."

I don't know any of the restaurants that opened last week, because I get my
information about restaurants from restaurant early adopters and reviewers.
This is how most people get their information about restaurants. That's why it
makes sense for restaurants to follow Geoffrey Moore's advice of using the
"bowling alley strategy" from Crossing the Chasm.

If you open a restaurant, you know in advance that you need to have a strategy
to get restaurant early adopters in the door. And you also know that
restaurant early adopters are the kind of people, by definition, who don't go
back to the same place twice if it isn't very good.

Basically, it's only luck if you're successful without knowing this and having
a plan to deal with it. And counting on this happening is a poor backup plan
at best.

------
fjabre
Not in total agreement here.

The web was just a tad simpler over a decade ago when Google 'launched'
initially. In fact a lot of the web's titans like Ebay, Paypal, Google, Amazon
etc.. were 'launched' during a different era if you will... It was called the
90s. I'm not so sure the same rules apply today. One should at least consider
that things have changed in this regard.

Every other product Google's come out with since then was 'launched' in what
we'd consider the 'traditional' way. Gmail was invites, Wave is invites.. Maps
was released with a lot of fanfare.

What I do agree with is that immediate or front page media attention after
launch is not indicative of the app's future success. In fact it seems the
more hype things have in the beginning the less staying power they seem to
have in the long run but I suppose it can go both ways and there is no one
rule..

~~~
pxlpshr
Couldn't agree with you more. I agree with "release-early-iterate-often"
however the notion of "never launch, just iterate" is bad advice IMO. This is
also one of the few times I was surprised that more HN readers didn't poke
holes in this blog post, but I think that's likely attributed to hacker ego in
regard to "marketing" vs "engineering".

A few thousands visitors does NOT mean you're doing things right, in fact it
_could be_ reinforcing poor judgement and a bad product. I've seen this happen
countless times by founders who didn't know when to stop drinking their own
kool-aid and meaningfully evaluate product holes because a handful of visitors
swore it was the best thing since slice bread.

------
dmillar
I don't see how launching and iterating are mutually exclusive.

------
IMorgothI12
I appreciate this recommendation.

"Thank you, you love me, you really love me!" \- The Mask

