

30 days after launching my side project - secondmod

Hi,
I launched a side project called Pinwoot (https://pinwoot.com) exactly 30 days ago on hackernews and reddit. 
Pinwoot is a simple user discovery tool for Pinterest users to grow their pinterest following organically but quickly and find like minded pinterest users.<p>After 30 days of launch, I managed to get 7000+ active users, about 100 paying users and $6129 in revenues.<p>My learnings :
1. Build your first main feature really well
2. Dont launch with 100s of features, keep the product simple
3. Make sure to have some influencers on your board as users from day one and make them super happy
4. Use tweet button very smartly - this is make or break up for your side project
5. Dont hurry up into making money, let your users ask you for more feature and then roll out paid features.<p>I invite your feedback and suggestions on how to further increase my user base. People are loving the product (you may search for pinwoot on twitter) but somehow, none of the good blogs are covering it. Any contacts or suggestions, most welcome.<p>My name is Alexander and can be reached at alexander@pinwoot.com
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manidoraisamy
"After 30 days of launch, I managed to get 7000+ active users, about 100
paying users and $6129 in revenues"

Wow! That's brilliant! How did you manage to convert 100 users to pay >$60 in
less than 30 days? Can you tell me more about it?

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secondmod
Thanks. As I mentioned in the post, I made sure that everyone sees the benefit
of this product within 30-60 minutes on the platform (algorithm pushes new
users on top of list to get them few followers quickly)

I waited for users to start asking for some extra features or more
seeds/credit points (people get 15 seeds to start with). I also clearly
mentioned that we have two things in pipeline 1.) Another useful free feature
2.) Pro Accounts as low as $15(will be available for only first 100)

So, by first week, people had tested the fruits of being on pinwoot, so they
started queuing up for pro accounts.

In 2nd week, I allowed people to start buying seeds for as low as $5 and
maximum $29. So, my users are buying those seeds on regular basis for last 2.5
weeks. I haven't launched pro accounts yet - once those are launched, I may
see monthly rev at around $15K.

In nutshell, make that one feature super awesome but add a limit to it such
that people get addicted to it and in want for more, they pay you.

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s3n
Clickable: <https://pinwoot.com>

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groundCode
Congratulations - looks slick. I don't have a pintrest account so I can't
really try it out or give you meaningful feedback, but good luck going
forward.

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shahed
I really love this idea and think I can/would like to help out.

Can we chat on Skype? My username: sdnerzz

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ozh
"Use tweet button very smartly" -- elaborate ?

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secondmod
We have to engage/activate our existing users to get more users. For that
twitter is the best mode.

On signup, we request users to tweet (just a request) - about 10% new users to
do this tweet. The language of this tweet was selected after number of (sort
of) A/B testing with different texts.

In the dashboard, when ever a user gets more than 10 new followers, we start
showing a message that provokes them to share a message like "Woot! I got X
#Pinterest followers from Pinwoot for free. If you are on Pinterest, you must
try it". This tweet is resulting in 15% of new signups daily.

~~~
dave_sid
Great idea prompting the user to tweet after 10 follows. Can I ask why you
didn't do the same with Facebook posts? Is your target market more likely to
be on Twitter?

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secondmod
We tried with both Tweet it or Share on Facebook. 83% people clicked on tweet
it only button. 12% clicked on both and rest 5% on Share on FB only. All the
new users that we got from this "Got_Followers" social sharing where from
twitter only. Yes, zero converted from Facebook posts. Hence, we decided to
stick with twitter only.

Another test we ran on our Facebook page (<http://facebook.com/pinwoot>) was
to have a tab called "Try Now" which was basically connected to our Facebook
connect app - that was great, many many conversions. So, we are still using
it.

