

Lessons learned: From 0 to 70,000 downloads in 30 days - baydinalex
http://baydin.com/blog/2010/09/from-55-to-70000-downloads-in-30-days/

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wccrawford
"Make a product people want, everything else you can fix later."

That's the real meat there.

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cloudkj
From the articles, it looks like the extension isn't listed in the Mozilla or
Chrome galleries. Is there a reason for this? How do you think it affects the
distribution and exposure of the product?

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ayemoah
We just wanted to control the growth before we got all the bugs ironed out. We
didn't know how well our servers would scale, and we don't have a support
staff. Not having the plugins listed certainly does impact the distribution
and the exposure of the product in terms of volume - when we come out of
closed beta, we'll have them there.

One of the big advantages, though, is that we also get to have more self
selecting and passionate users this way and they tell others who would care.

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cloudkj
Cool. Good luck to you guys! One suggestion is that you guys should look into
releasing a Safari version as well. Since it's Webkit-based, it takes almost
zero effort going from Chrome to Safari. I recently wrote a Firefox extension
and was able to port it to Chrome and Safari quite easily, since it's pretty
much all Javascript.

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ayemoah
Thank you. Safari is the most requested one among the ones we're currently not
supporting.

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lifeoffbi
awesome piece and great lessons learned. a word of advice, from personal
experience of having a start-up featured in NYT, Forbes, Businessweek, RWW,
etc launch news to pubs is about 50X more interesting than updates or follow-
up stories. as someone who has used and referred the product, i am providing a
word of caution that you really need to think about opening other channels to
get reach because your 3rd month referral traffic could very possibly be less
than 20% of this month's.

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jacquesm
Beware of the pit of despair though, media coverage is like fireworks, it goes
up and then explodes with a bang to fall back to the ground. Make sure you
engage your users and make sure that you get enough of a tie to them that you
can entice them to come back.

In the case of a download add a feature that checks for updates and maybe
'newsworthy' items that you can present to your users using the app.

