

100,000 Users And So Can You (A history of Carbonmade) - maxstoller
http://spencerfry.com/2009/10/21/100000-users-and-so-can-you

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spencerfry
Someone asked why we haven't updated our homepage in 3 years (and the
significance of that) and if I could speak to that. The comment got deleted
before I could respond, so I'll just create a new thread.

It's partially covered in the article. The first year, we were still do
consulting work, so we barely spent any time on Carbonmade. And then in the
second year, we were working on a second product that never saw the light of
day. And now in the third year, we're focused on Carbonmade exclusively and
nearly ready to release the new version.

Here's what I learned from running a company for three years without any
update to the product: Excellent customer service could be the most
significant thing you can do. (Granted, you need a pretty solid product.)
During the first year we were really bad with emails and responding to our
customers around the Net. We practically ignored everyone and everything. We
just didn't have the time. Then in year two, I began to take customer support
very seriously. I'd respond to peoples emails within minutes (when I could)
and within hours 90% of the time. You literally can take a look at our graphs
and see a HUGE uptick in signups/paid sign ups/customer retention within a
month of responding to emails.

I also went back through at least 6 months of old emails that we had simply
archived away and responded to everyone explaining how sorry we were for not
giving them good support and answering their questions. I wrote everyone
individually and got a lot of "it's no problem, I'm happy that you're spending
the time to do so now." It really impacted our brand a lot and we saw a lot of
people begin to respond with emails like: "Wow, you guys responded faster than
I've ever been responded to before. You're so great. Thanks so much for your
service. I'm telling all my friends."

Also, around this time I chose to treat all customers equally no matter if
they were paying or if they weren't. I figured -- and you'd think this was
obvious -- that spending a few extra minutes to treat free customers well will
make them more likely to upgrade and actually costs less (in time and money)
than going out and finding new customers. This turned out to be very
successful. I can point to hundreds of emails from free customers that
upgraded after hearing back from a "real person who was kind and helpful".

Good customer service is king and really turned our product around.

(Thanks for reading my rant.)

~~~
jbyers
"Excellent customer service could be the most significant thing you can do."

Amen. At Wikispaces we absolutely obsessed over fast, human responses to
support questions early on -- and still do. People are regularly shocked to
get a response at all, let alone from a person, let alone in the span of a few
minutes. That email can be the difference between getting frustrated and
leaving for good vs. being a long term site user.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Its actually a relative minimum of effort to respond very quickly -
drastically reduces the number of outstanding issues to track. Ignoring
tracking, it takes the same total effort to answer NOW as a week from now. Now
I wish my garage mechanic/doctor would operate this way.

~~~
spencerfry
Yeah. It's funny. As soon as you start doing it, it's really not that hard to
keep up with.

------
mrshoe
> _Creative people are likely to be friends with other creative people who
> turn out to need portfolios themselves, and this creates a rapidly expanding
> circle... our users derive a direct benefit from showing off their
> portfolio, which in turn is free marketing for our service._

If you're a startup looking to get noticed online, I'd suggest taking this to
heart. Marketing is much easier if your users have a strong incentive to
market your product for you.

> _We don’t subscribe to the "Release Early, Release Often" philosophy.
> Admittedly, we’re perfectionists to a fault, but when you’ve got 158,000
> pleased users, you can’t simply disrupt things with a series of bells-and-
> whistles updates just to follow a silly motto._

I don't think that philosophy is meant to apply to applications with hundreds
of thousands of users. It's meant for the early product development phase when
you have very few users. You can, however, do bucket testing, like Google and
other larger players, and release updates to a tiny portion of your users to
see how they react.

~~~
spencerfry
"I don't think that philosophy is meant to apply to applications with hundreds
of thousands of users. It's meant for the early product development phase when
you have very few users. You can, however, do bucket testing, like Google and
other larger players, and release updates to a tiny portion of your users to
see how they react."

Totally agree with you there. That's actually something I really want to start
doing after we release our new version. We've never done any type of A/B
testing and it just makes sense.

On a similar note, I was talking with my friend Eric Friedman last night about
this very topic. He suggested creating small buttons that people could click
on, but weren't actually active and gave a "Coming Soon" message and then
tracking the frequency in how often they were clicked. You could release these
little buttons to 2-5% of your users and then see how they performed. And then
build features around the buttons that were clicked more frequently.

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jasonlbaptiste
This is a GREAT read. I love stories that get into the nitty gritty details.
Sort of like Founders at Work. 100k users don't come out of nowhere. There's a
lot that causes that and lots of tinkering. Figuring it out is great.

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fjabre
Thanks for this piece Spencer. Very inspiring indeed.

I really like the "Give the demo a try" feature on the landing page. Could you
give any insight into whether this see-for-yourself feature really aided in
getting signups..?

I was thinking about doing something similar for my site, which is why I'm
asking...

Thanks and best of luck on your continued growth.

~~~
iamcarbon
@fjabre. We initially introduced the demo to help cut back on people signing
up to see how the product worked with no intention of using it. Oddly enough,
it actually reduced our total number of signups. But the users that make it
through and signup are much more likely to be long term active users.

~~~
fjabre
Ha. Didn't think of it from that angle.. but that makes total sense.. Thanks!

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raghus
Just saw this from 37s: [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1976-launch-haystack-
a-better...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1976-launch-haystack-a-better-way-
for-web-designers-to-find-clients-and-for-clients-to-find-web-designers)

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asmosoinio
Font looks very odd on my Vista machine, but I am a happy user of Readability:
<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

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mistermann
The white on black overlaying everything just grates on me for some reason.
Otherwise very nice.

