
How YesGraph Got Its First 1000 Users - ivankirigin
http://blog.yesgraph.com/post/63562259689/first-1000
======
jere
>Blog. If you make great content, people will read it and share it.

This reminds me of a jwz quote, except I would rewrite it as such:

 _Some people, when confronted with a marketing problem, think "I know, I'll
blog about it." Now they have two marketing problems._

The whole premise of an article like this is that a great product won't draw
in users by itself, but it's assumed that a great blog _will_ draw in readers
magically. I'm not saying you can't build a large readership. We've seen it
done many times. But I'm skeptical that you have to do any less work than you
would just to promote the product in the first place. The internet is filled
with blogs that nobody reads... I'm writing one myself.

~~~
ivankirigin
Your comment is timely because I spent more time promoting this post than
writing it. Compared to the last blog post on the blog, it got 100X the
traction after ~3X the promotion effort.

I completely agree actually. The relationship between frequency, quality,
promotion, and traction on a blog is fascinating.

~~~
grinnick
How are you promoting the post? When I think of ways to promote blog posts I
can only think of ideas which are quick (post to HN, tweet about it etc.).

What are you doing differently?

~~~
pault
This doesn't really answer your question specifically, but one helpful way to
think about it is to invert your process. Most people create content and then
try to find a traffic source for it. The most successful marketers I know find
traffic sources and then create content for them.

~~~
grinnick
Thanks. That does resonate with me actually.

~~~
pault
It's a _lot_ harder than most people think. A fun exercise is to seek out some
message board or facebook page for a group of people you have _nothing_ in
common with and see if you can repurpose or create content that engages them.
Create a mailing list and see how many people you can get to sign up. It's
great practice and you'll quickly realize how insanely difficult it is to
interact with people regarding a subject they are passionate about without
sounding like a paid shill. It's easy for those of us with a technical
background to belittle the marketing folks, but there's an art to it that
isn't readily apparent until you are staring at that proverbial empty piece of
paper.

Edit: the oatmeal comics are a perfect example of this. The best advertising
doesn't look like advertising.

~~~
grinnick
Nah I totally get what you're saying. I'm just trying to teach myself some
marketing skills at the moment (coming from a tech background) and I can't
seem to get any traction at all. Interestingly I'm actually doing the exact
mailing list thing you suggest already (conversionnewsletter.com). It's far
harder than I though it would be from the outside and, as you say, great
practice.

------
programminggeek
I think it would be interesting to see a followup to this about when they make
their first $1,000, $10,000, $100,000 etc...

Getting free users is not the hardest thing in the world. People like free
things. Getting them to pay you is a different thing altogether.

~~~
njudah
I had an insightful manager once who told me 'you'd be surprised how hard it
is to sell something for free.' The point being, getting their attention and
usage is in fact pretty difficult.

~~~
zabramow
Agree. Especially since people are sick of signing up for services, especially
when it requires username and password.

------
ecesena
Thanks for sharing, we're facing similar problems and comparison is always
useful!

Betali.st and similar "tools" worked well for us, although users from these
services are easily to get in, but harder to keep engaged (I guess as they're
used to jump to the next novelty).

~~~
ivankirigin
Did you compare the results across such alpha list tools?

~~~
ecesena
The best for us was erlibird.com, say ~500 users in a couple of months.

------
ivankirigin
I'd be particularly interested in hearing about different ad channels people
tried early on. If anyone has any experiences to share, I'd really appreciate
it.

~~~
ecesena
In addition to Google Analytics, we tried Twitter, Facebook and Stumble Upon.

My feeling is that, at early stages, all outperform analytics unless you
really know what you're selling and/or you've good landing pages. All have
their specific "way to use it", e.g. on Facebook you need a page with
engagement, on Stumble you need "something" that people can stumple upon :)
e.g. blog posts.

Here I'm considering signups as conversions. Analytics (and Bing) were good to
reach a lot of page views (that may still be useful).

~~~
zizee
When you say "Google Analytics" do you mean "Google Adwords"?

------
piALGO
Just started using Pinterest to post relevant infographics. I use buff.ly to
manage all my social media postings, and I have them all linked together so
that people interested in topics related to our technology can find us and
learn about what we're doing.

------
fitzpasd
Ghostery blocks this entire article for me... (first time I've ever seen that
happen)

~~~
ivankirigin
I think it's the linkedin widget. I'll remove it

------
ivankirigin
This new post by Brian Balfour is related and super awesome
[http://brianbalfour.com/post/63581380690/customer-
acquisitio...](http://brianbalfour.com/post/63581380690/customer-acquisition)

------
sybhn
doh!! Signed up for a trial just to realize yesgraph's a linkedin message
cannon >:(

~~~
ivankirigin
Actually we don't send any messages over Facebook and LinkedIn. If we did, it
would be with explicit permission per message.

Here is how it works

    
    
      1. Describe a role
      2. Invite people to make recommendations 
      (using the invite link or the direct email flow)
      3. Connect to get contacts, and we make it easy to recommend good people
    

That's basically it! Try it out and let me know what you think:
ivan@yesgraph.com

