
Thoughts on a failed launch - vaksel
http://blog.styleguidance.com/post/295999544/thoughts-on-a-failed-launch

======
jkincaid
Cheer up. There's a good chance that many of the big tech blogs didn't see
your site at all, or your text pitch wasn't all that compelling (but maybe
your site is), or any of a hundred other reasons.

The sad fact of the matter is that us tech bloggers get way too much Email. No
matter how many Gmail filters we set up, it's a constant struggle to find
those 'diamonds in the rough' — the sites that nobody has ever heard of and
have no funding. If you get ignored by everyone for multiple launches then
maybe something's wrong, but don't get too dejected because of one bad press
push.

Shoot me an Email next time you guys launch a cool new feature (it's in my
profile). Tell me why it's cool. Tell me why you're more than a Digg for style
questions. No promises about a post, but I'll check it out. Also, just from a
five second glance at the site, I think you might want to look into changing
up the layout/colors a bit. I'm no designer though.

~~~
prawn
I also thought the design was a significant problem with the site (and I am a
designer/developer). It's dark and cramped and the header is really
uninspiring to me.

I seems like StackOverflow for fashion newbies more than Digg. If it's largely
occupied by the hapless, you might want to elevate a few users (beyond the
concept of points, etc) to some sort of style-leader designation. And maybe
add Gravatars - it really lacked personalities and imagery.

After reading the piece, however, my interest was in seeing the pitch that
went out to blogs. How easy was it for them to give you coverage? Did you
provide stats, incentives, quotes, ready-to-go screen caps, etc?

~~~
vaksel
yeah the design is going to be changed, basically it was a choice between
launching now, or spending more time tinkering with it. At a certain point,
you just have to launch, and leave the fixes for the next version. At this
point, I have a list about a mile wide of things I want to do, and you know
how it is, every time you finish something you get a dozen new ideas you want
to implement.

Gravatars already exist, you just have to enter the actual question to see
them. No gravatars on the homepage, so that it loads faster.

And I'll make another post about the pitch email and the press page tomorrow.

------
apsurd
Why so negative?

First off thanks for taking the time to share it with us. I read the whole
post. Good to see your incremental progress. Which brings me to the header of
my comment. I don't see in any way how your launch was a "failure". You have
"fail" and "sucked" peppered throughout your post. Why!

 _I wasn’t too surprised or worried by the results, since that was more or
less what I expected._

2 problems here: Why expect failure? And secondly, can't call it a waste of
time then since you knew beforehand what you were getting into - your choice.

Not trying to shoot you down more - quite the opposite! I don't see how your
launch was a failure at all. You have more data than 100% of people with
"ideas" and 100% of people in "stealth mode". And how is you gaining traffic
an epic fail? Even if its one user! I see a positive slope in that graph
damnit!

Personally I have erased the concept of "failing" from existence. Simply
because if all things are trials, then you benefit from data received back. It
doesn't matter whether that data is "good" or "bad", data is data. And one
does trials so one can get better at doing those trials! So you fail when you
die, till then don't recognize its existence.

Be happy man.

My graphs have a scale of 1-10 (yes im serious). so when i start to see the
1-100 (like yours) I will be ass-happy.

=) Congratulations!

~~~
vaksel
hehe too negative? I guess I was trying to show a different side of the coin
compared to Paul's post. If it was a standalone post, I'd probably make it
more optimistic. "on launch day we hit an unprecedented 500 users in a single
day".

But yeah overall it's been a very good month.

Thanks :)

I agree on the failure part, I think the key concept to take away, is that
this is a marathon, not a sprint. Don't expect instant gratification

~~~
ccamrobertson
I think that you have taken the recent atmosphere of "failing fast" a little
too far. A "launch" really can't be considered a good metric for failure or
success.

Pegging your product on one massive launch is a flawed idea - it seems to
operate under the assumption that massive, immediate reach is what you need to
attract users as opposed to leveraging/exploiting other mechanisms. Having
product "out" at all stages in order to gain feedback and iterate helps.

In fact, it is far better that you had a "failed" launch now so that users can
give you feedback as opposed to trying to remain stealth to build up to a
bigger launch.

I think that Skribit's "successful" launch can be more attributed to how Paul
handled the pro upgrade screw up. But the TC article isn't what will make or
break the success of Skribit.

~~~
vaksel
To me failing fast, just means that you realize that the idea sucks and you
close down shop and move on. And yeah if you have a crappy launch, you
shouldn't use that to discount your idea. You only need to hit a certain niche
of users to make your idea work.

To tell the truth, we really haven't gotten that much feedback after we came
out of private beta. In private beta we got hundreds of tips, feature requests
etc, and now in public beta, nada. Not a single feature request last week.

Yeah an article on TC won't make or break a startup, but it sure does help. a)
better response to your other coverage requests b) a small bump to your page
rank c) a flood of potential new users to help jump start the site.

If I had to give it a numerical value, I'd say major launch coverage, can help
you save 1-2 years of building your traffic the old fashioned way...1 person
at a time

------
matt1
Hey, thanks for writing this up. If I might make a suggestion: at the
beginning of this post, you should explain what your site does. As someone who
had never heard of it before, I was left with a choice of reading the rest of
the post and hopng to find out or navigating away from it to explore the site.
A short description would have helped those unfamiliar with your service and
wouldn't have offended those that are.

One other thing: For a site about style, the site is not very stylish itself.
I think for your site, a designer or a few CSS books (SitePoint has some good
ones) would be a good investment.

Again, thanks for the writeup. Looks like it has a lot of growth potential.

Edit: maybe it didn't render properly on my iPhone on the first visit. Upon
checking it again, I can see the design. It was just white text on a plain
black body the first time around. Looks better now.

~~~
vaksel
i added that bit to the start of the post.

I know what you mean about the design, a redesign is definitely in the plans.
Just didn't want to spend that extra time redoing the design, instead of
launching.

------
gojomo
I wouldn't try for tech-blog coverage at all. The overlap with your intended
audience is approximately nil. And what if you did get tech-blog
validation/coverage? It would only encourage copycats.

That said, I like the idea -- one of the better StackExchange verticals I've
seen. But to beat other similar sites -- perhaps even sibling StackExchange
sites -- your initial community is all-important. The only successful 'launch'
is one that brings the right kind of askers/answerers... and I suspect most of
those people _aren't_ rushing to check out 'launched' products; they instead
stumble onto new sites by a variety of paths generally unaffected by 'launch'
publicity.

And to echo other commenters: the design/color-scheme doesn't say 'stylish' to
me, and I suspect for your audience, that could be important. (The dark purple
makes me think more of a sports site, and the manila-yellow makes everything
look like a field-needing-input.)

Can you follow the design cues of some emblematic sites in the fashion/beauty
category? Does StackExchange platform provide any way to A/B test different
looks?

Good luck!

~~~
vaksel
to tell the truth there really isn't that much competition among SEs. Everyone
is doing their own thing. Actually it's kinda getting dead, since a lot of
people are giving up. Since it's hard building an audience

As far as actual competitor sites, most of them are generic, and we have much
higher quality controls for posts. On Yahoo Answers, "What does the color red
look like?" is a valid question, and on ours that gets deleted.

For design cues, I have a whole list of sites that I'll be using for
inspiration.

No the SE platform doesn't let you A/B test anything. It's really very basic
at this point. Pretty much all you can do is edit a CSS file, and add stuff to
a box just above header, footer, 3 spots for ads.

So pretty much if you want to do anything, you need to add a ton of javascript
and css.

------
Angryhacker
If I may offer some negative feedback...for a site that specializes in Style,
it simply looks massively crappy. I mean, the colors on the site don't even
match.

I don't know whether it's a problem with the stack-exchange sites in general,
but I have yet to see a single one (other than the mother ship) that does not
look like utter crap.

~~~
vaksel
already explained this, early users complained about our original look, so we
kept throwing designs at them, until they settled on this one. We went through
like 5 redesigns, and this is what they ended up liking, pretty much
universally.

Maybe it's the fact that we are going for a non-techie audience, but they seem
to like the "crappy" design. But yeah I agree with you, it's pretty bad, which
is why we'll be redoing it a few months down the road.

Pretty much, just wanted to get it over with and launch, since if you keep
perfecting your site, you'll never think it's good enough to launch. I'd
rather launch and have a 20% churn rate because of a bad design than spend an
extra 3 months in development. Waiting to make it perfect.

You can always change your design later, but you'll never get those 3 months
back.

P.S. You think SO looks good?

------
PStamatiou
Interesting post and thanks for offering a different perspective to mine! In
regards to new users, do you think it's because registration is only done
through OpenID (which is great on a tech-heavy site like Stackoverflow) with a
not-so-tech-savvy style-centric audience?

A massive-to-us 34% of new user signups that day were through Twitter, thanks
to a riduculously low one-click barrier of entry.

As for contacting bloggers, we only got in touch with TC for launch day and
have yet to reach out to my other blogger friends, et cetera. Gonna wait til
after the holidays.

That being said - you are definitely getting some traction with the 700+
uniques/day. Grats!

~~~
vaksel
I don't think openID was really that big of a problem(the login page has a
bounce rate of only 1.59%). There is a non-openID login solution in the works,
so that shouldn't be a problem in the future.

I think the lack of registered users is mainly because you don't need to
register to ask/answer questions. The site is 99% useful w/o registering. The
only feature they don't have is voting.

So pretty much the only people who end up registering, are the super active
users, who want to dive in, and participate.

We aren't really focusing on registering users, the goal is to make it easy to
create new content, more content = more ways for Google to find our site.

Basically at this stage it's a SEO play, the goal is to become THE answer site
for fashion/style questions.

------
ErrantX
Im interested why you targeted tech blogs (not your audience at all) instead
of style blogs.

There are plenty of big beauty/style blogs out there who might have covered
you :)

~~~
vaksel
I targetted both, about ~15 tech blogs, and about 80 style ones.

------
vaksel
btw guys this was pretty much off the cuff(I was actually planning on making
this post after christmas, after I got the comments fixed), so if you have any
ideas about what else I should talk about in the post, let me know

------
sailormoon
I have to wonder, is there some minimum value add for a site to be considered
a startup?

I mean, great, but this is just another Stack Exchange instance .. how long
before that software is considered as basically a standard tool like
WordPress? If it isn't already? Do we talk about some lightly-customised
Wordpress blog "failing to launch"? Hell at least that might have original
content.

Making available an instance of server software you didn't write, with some
minimal twist, != startup, IMO.

~~~
vaksel
true, but the key to any site is content. It doesn't matter if you have some
cool new technology, users don't care about that. And I call it a launch,
since noone knows about SO, let alone SE, except for a few thousand tech
geeks. So the idea of "oh it's just another wordpress blog" didn't come up in
the decision to cover it.

And hey, I had a phone interview with Venture Beat...when I launched my "non-
startup"...which is more than some "startups" can say.

Techcrunch is just a wordpress blog and it gets 7.5 million uniques. WikiHow
is just a mediawiki instance and it gets 20 million uniques. You can't focus
too much on a platform. You think those guys couldn't build their own product
from scratch? Sure they could, but then they'd have wasted 1-2 years in
development time, when they didn't have to, and that's just stupid.

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of turn key solutions being used
to make a business. Meanwhile your cool new startup with 3 years of coding,
100,000 lines of code, gets 50 hits a day.

Sure I could have went out and coded up my own Q&A site, but why do that when
I can just use a turn key solution?

Plus there are already >4,000 lines of customization code in the site, which
is probably more than some people have in their "unique" web apps, who you'd
label as a startup.

Being a startup is a state of mind, you can be a "startup" with a hello world
application, as long as you feel you are. It doesn't matter how you get there,
all that matters, is that at the end of the day you are working towards
building something positive.

And we are getting plenty of traffic to justify that we are doing something
people need. Hence the startup label.

~~~
ErrantX
> It doesn't matter if you have some cool new technology, users don't care
> about that.

That's precisely what they care about :)

BTW those examples you give built up content and traffic over a long period of
time. They were innovative in their areas - but not with their technology,
with their content and their focus.

(Im not commenting on you being a startup or not btw)

~~~
vaksel
actually no they don't. All they care about is results.

Same goes double for me. Sure I could have coded the thing up myself. Wasted a
year, two, building the product, made 2-3 extra features. And for what? To get
a "good job, but it's just another answers site" and a pat on the back? Screw
that, I'd rather use those 2 years to build up my content and traffic.

Content is all that matters anyways. Content drives traffic, content gets
users to stick around. Who wants to waste 2 years building a site, only to
have to start out with 50 users a day traffic numbers?

~~~
ErrantX
I wasn't talking about building a site etc. Just addressing that one
statement. users Really love cool stuff.

What you have isn't something with cool features, your right it is content.
That kind of site will take a year or more to build up. But it is the same
process your pouring scorn on :-) there is still no guarantee.

~~~
vaksel
Cool features will come later. The current version of the site is basically
just a way to start building up traffic for the big idea.

But yeah it'll probably take 1-2 years to build up the content and traffic.
But you gotta start somewhere, 10 people here, 10 people there, and before
long, you are hitting millions of people a month.

