
The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunched - vacanti
http://viniciusvacanti.com/2012/11/19/the-depressing-day-after-you-get-techcrunched/
======
diego
These posts make me want to write a Startup FAQ:

Q: How do I get on Techcrunch:

A: Ignore Techcrunch. Don't waste brain cycles on them. If they cover you on
their own, great. It almost certainly won't do anything to improve your odds
of success, but it probably can't hurt. A better question to ask is: how do I
design and implement the right marketing strategy for my startup?

~~~
jcfrei
I'd say the takeway from yipit is that they need to build a better product. If
the engagement is that low after receiving 8k+ hits (resulting in 3 returning
users), then it's probably not the right time to work on a marketing strategy.
you need to go all the way back and work on the fundamentals of your product.
0.03% (as well as the 1.5% for users who successfully signed up) is an abysmal
rate for returning users - no matter how you put it.

~~~
vacanti
The post was loosely based on our experience years ago. We now have many users
and our conversion rates are much higher.

I just wanted people to know that getting some PR isn't the finish line, it's
the start of the race.

~~~
jcfrei
that's encouraging to hear. so what did you do to increase conversion rates?
work on the landing page, change your product or something else?

------
seiji
Unless your target audience is "vapid people who care about online startup
gossip rags," then please don't get upset when your launch is 99.999% bounces.

After working on one project for a protracted period of time, we become
slightly delusional. We think we matter more than we do. We think people care
a heckuva lot more than they do. That's perfectly fine, but you _must_
recognize your own delusions and not base your hopes and dreams on 'em.

Drag in your target customers and adjust from there.

~~~
eliza1wright
This. TechCrunch can be useful but it's almost Twitter-like in its update
speed, so even a positive write-up gets drowned out by the next hundred
blurbs.

------
swalsh
I clicked on the website, yipit. didn't make it any further then the first
screen.

The problem is you want a lot of work and personal info from me up front. I
have no idea who you are, but you expect me to give you my email right away?
Nope sorry I don't trust you.

This is kind of like going to a restaurant you've never heard about, that has
no yelp reviews, but is just a giant door. Then before you walk in a guy in a
black suit says "There's a $10 cover charge". You ask "What kind of music do
you play?" "what kind of food do you serve". You receive no answer. So you
turn around, and go next door.

Your start up is special to you, and your mom. Not to me, don't expect me to
put any effort into it or trust into you.

Once I love you, then i'll try you.

~~~
Cakez0r
I figured I'd check out the website too. I click on 'Get started - it's free!'
and was also instantly put off by having to enter my email. I enter a fake to
see whether it'd be worth it... "20% complete! Tell us which emails you'd like
to receive?" 20% complete?! I don't want to receive ANY emails! I just want to
see the product.

After deciding to abandon the process, I went back to the home page, which
then redirected me to <http://yipit.com/boston/categories/dining-nightlife/> !
This should be amongst the first things a user sees! This is what I was
looking for!

~~~
Matt_Mickiewicz
Sign-up forms must die... great article by Luke that i often refer to:
<http://www.alistapart.com/articles/signupforms/>

There's also a video version of it somewhere else.

This is why Optimizely.com is so great, you can test drive their product
without ever creating an account.

------
incision
>Boom. A tweet every 5 minutes. People are re-tweeting the TechCrunch article
covering your startup’s launch.

This is something I don't "get" about Twitter or the people who seem to care
about it.

There's an awful lot of tweeting and re-tweeting of completely generic "news"
like a new post on Techcrunch with nothing added in the way of context or even
opinion.

It's pure noise.

Using the social buttons as an indicator, everything on TC gets tweeted
hundreds of times while collecting at best a few dozen shares to other
services and a small handful of direct comments.

Given that, I'd interpret the "tweet every 5 minutes" to be something like
"three _meaningful_ tweets in a day".

>Why didn’t more people sign-up? Why didn’t people complete the sign-up flow?
Why weren’t people coming back?

I'd guess it's the same reason behind all the fake emails described in the
sign-ups that were completed.

The landing page doesn't adequately or engagingly describe / demo the service
and why it's worth a damn. Do that first, then make it trivial to sign-up
honestly.

~~~
sharkweek
There are so many accounts / bots on Twitter that just auto-tweet anything
from TC (and virtually every reputable news site), it's hard to take Twitter
count as anything of value the day of a press release as there will be a lot
of meaningless noise.

------
pud
Tech press comes in handy for biz dev, marketing, and fundraising purposes:
You can send the article to potential partners and it makes you look legit.

Side-note: This article is on the front page of HN now (congrats to the
author, well played!) but there's no link to the company or TC article in the
blog, that I can see.

~~~
vhf
Link to the company looks less relevant since the article says it is loosely
based on something that happens years ago.

There's a link to the company under the author's name on the top right,
though. :)

------
Negitivefrags
I absolutely know how this feels.

When we announced our game we managed to get articles on a bunch of top tier
gaming media. IGN, PC Gamer, G4TV, and a whole host of smaller sites.

And here is what it all amounted to: <http://i.imgur.com/IqBcy.png>

Sad isn't it.

Each time you get a new article you get a spike, and then a downturn, but each
one leaves your baseline higher. Now we get many times the traffic we got in a
spike at announcement every day.

~~~
leelin

      Each time you get a new article you get a spike, and then 
      a downturn, but each one leaves your baseline higher. Now
      we get many times the traffic we got in a spike at
      announcement every day.
    

I've noticed this higher baseline effect and it seems to hold true even though
I am 3+ years into my startup. Others have spoken about it too (David Rusenko
of Weebly quite recently). I find it fascinating.

Why is the baseline higher? Is it link juice from SEO? Is it some mysterious
equilibrium of new users and returning users but more of them find you through
the article? Is it simply that X out of 1,000,000 people have heard of you,
and X gets incremented by a small amount and therefore your daily base traffic
increases?

To be honest our traffic has been very predictable, both in the weekly steady
state and the year-over-year growth. I'm shocked the daily variance of visits
isn't a lot more.

~~~
ohashi
I've seen the effect too and depending on the nature of the site it can go
down after a while too. Content sites come to mind, if you don't keep
generating new content, the baseline drops.

I think the answer though is a combination of all the little boosts each
article gives (seo, returning visitors, links). Even old articles send
visitors. As you collect more of them, the baseline increases.

------
rll
And the answer to, "Why won't people share" is probably because people are
extremely tired of automated 4square-like notices. I know I instantly unfollow
anyone from Twitter if I see a 4square notice. If I started seeing yipit ones
I bet I would react the same way.

------
xoail
The Weebly guys at the startupschool this year were awesome. They shared their
experience with getting featured on TechCrunch and alike media and how their
hopes were once high and then down the drain days later when realize posts on
sites like that don't really mean much. What a startup really need is a bunch
of people (user, media, partners) talking about it (positive talk) over
certain period of time to gain traction and convert more stop-byers to
users/customers. The space is getting more competitive and thes things don't
mean much these days - \- Got featured on TC \- Got 1 million users \- Got
angel funding

------
catwell
This article is completely true about traffic driven directly by TechCrunch:
lots of users who test, zero retention.

That said there's a slightly more interesting effect to being featured on
TechCrunch, and that's what I would call "rebounds": other media noticing your
startup / project / whatever and talking about it.

For instance, one week after Moodstocks Notes (a kind of side project /
experiment of our B2B image recognition company) was picked up by TC in 2010
([http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/10/moodstocks-notes-is-
stickyb...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/10/moodstocks-notes-is-stickybits-
without-the-barcodes/)) [1] it got featured in Mashable
(<http://mashable.com/2010/12/18/moodstocks/>). It drove slightly less
traffic, but retention was an order of magnitude higher. Smaller, more focused
blogs are even better.

That being said, even taking all that into account, fighting to get on TC is
probably not worth it. In our case we basically got featured because Michael
Arrington noticed us at LeWeb and thought what we were doing was cool, so it
did not cost us too much effort. The only negative effect it had was to delude
us into thinking we could have unexpected B2C success at hand and divert part
of our efforts away from our B2B product, but fortunately that didn't last
very long ;)

[1] Yes, I know, this video is terrible. I still can't figure out what
happened...

------
peteforde
I can appreciate why this would seem like the morning after a rave, but if you
stop and consider what really just happened — a whole bunch of other startup
founders just drove by slowly on the way to the next post — then you have
nothing to feel sad about.

Those 8000+ visitors are presumably not your target demographic, and it's
unlikely that you're solving a problem that they have.

I really recommend that you read the 1st CopyHackers book on identifying the
motivations of the people most likely to be your paying customers. Many
startups fail because they try to shoot for a general market. In reality, you
will convert very well if you correctly anticipate the motivations of the top
20% vs trying to be all things to all people.

The reason is that no matter how great your landing page is, you cannot
manufacture motivation in your visitors — even a brilliant product will fail
if you market it to the wrong people. Everything in your public messaging
should reinforce exactly one message:

We solve X problem for Y.

Resist the urge to add more X, and don't be so hard on yourself if you are
ignored by Z, because your product is for Y.

------
joeblau
Q. Did you build something users need?

The reason I ask this is because a lot of times, this can be overlooked. I
have found myself spending time twiddling with projects that seem cool to me,
then when I ask a few friends what they think about it--they are say things
like "yeah that's cool, but..."

What comes after the "but" is what you need to listen to. If lots of regular
people are raising issues with you're idea, you may want to rethink your idea.
The internet is not the field of dreams so just because you build it, it
doesn't mean people will come.

Also relying on TechCrunch as your marketing strategy is a poor business
decision.

Edit: Also this video from StatupSchool.org by David Rusenko (Founder, Weebly)
puts being on TechCrunch, Newsweek and Time into perspective.

<http://www.startupschool.org/2012/rusenko/> \- Click "Our Story"

------
josephlord
Has having the information offscreen (<http://yipit.com>) until you do the
none obvious scroll been AB tested? It screams bad idea and style over
substance to me so I would be really interested if you had data contradicting
my gut.

------
startupstella
LOVE this point...definitely have felt this before at feefighters. however,
there are benefits to TC other than just getting signups (especially for non
technical startups as some have mentioned). you just have to keep in mind that
PR has varying goals: 1) Exposure- people will remember you and refer you when
they see you in top press 2) One TC doesnt build traffic/signups, but multiple
articles over a long period of time will 3) Brand equity grows with media
exposure 4) now you get to put the TC logo on your homepage=social
proof=higher conversion 5) Links!

we are planning on doing a big pr launch for matchist when this kind of
exposure will serve us well (timing is everything with pr)

------
ajsharp
We found very similar results. In our experience (Zaarly) tech press has
yielded very little long-term value, _especially_ from a user growth
perspective. The retention rate of users from article traffic is very, very
low. An article on TC, VentureBeat, Pando, etc yielded us very little beyond
your standard insular chatter amongst the tech community.

On the other hand, I think tech press can be useful if the goal is not solely
user acquisition. For example, if you're simply trying to raise awareness of
your brand and product within the tech community, especially amongst
investors, I think tech press has some value. Other than that, YMMV.

------
dev360
Techcrunch is by far the most overrated event in the life of a startup. For
the life of me, I don't understand why founders don't spend more time getting
quality publicity from more mainstream media sources instead.

------
r3m6
Ignoring TechCrunch (and other high profile blogs) is bad advice.

Right, the traffic you will get from them surprisingly low, but they are a
fantastic source of _instant social proof_ \- After all, you must be good,
otherwise they would not cover you, would they? ... ;)

A TC logo/quote on your home page can improve conversion rates for years to
come.

This social proof is especially useful if you are self-funded, and can not
show off your "Received X millions from Sequoia/YC/Whatever..." badge of
honor.

~~~
bcoates
I don't think the average internet user, or even the average early
adopter/techie type, knows what TechCrunch is and is even less likely to know
about random VC firms. It's all inside-baseball stuff to users.

------
sw007
Great blog. Exactly how I feel. My question is how do I get traffic? I feel
quite lost - we got covered by Mashable and other places and like you didn't
get an amazing number of signups - a good number but nothing major. Now I am
at a bit of a loss as to how to get people to the site - probably a stupid
admission but it feels like the million dollar question to me at the moment.

------
tlrobinson
It's much more effective to go after blogs that cater to your target audience,
even if their readership is a fraction of TechCrunch's.

------
akoumjian
Sounds like a pretty good conversion rate to me.

------
mbrzuzy
Was getting on TechCrunch seriously their only marketing strategy?

That shouldn't even be a part of your marketing strategy.

------
joonix
You're still asking for an email address before showing me anything about your
site. This is really mindblowing. Why would I hand over a real email address
to a site I know nothing about? Why won't you just let me skip and take a
look?

------
iamleppert
I think people are burned out on daily deal sites and deal aggregators. I
checked out your product and while it seems to be executed well, it didn't
offer me a compelling reason to come back.

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nevster
Huh, put in some dummy email address. Than hit next. Then go back to yipit.com
and you can see the real site.

Asking for an email before showing me what you do is absolutely crazy.

------
tlogan
One suggestion: It might be good idea to change your flow so that email is the
last think you ask - "and now to get your savings please enter your email".

------
jgrahamc
Given the number of stories that TechCrunch writes per day I fully expect my
dog's next poop to be covered at some point.

There is no point even thinking about TechCrunch.

------
andrewbaron
I had no idea people put this much weight on a press release for their start
ups. Great ideas are hard to contain on their own already.

------
michaelochurch
My experience with growth curves of social phenomena (blog, card game) is that
they have an underlying real growth curve that's slow but steady, plus
"impulses" that shoot up high (orders of magnitude) but decay exponentially.
To avoid getting depressed, you have to focus on the underlying curve, not the
decline that exists when one is getting farther away from a not-controllable
(and often random) event impulse.

------
indiecore
Who the hell cares? You got 400 people you otherwise wouldn't have.

~~~
akama
I think the problem is that people believe that once they are on techcrunch,
their struggles are all over and that it's the holy grail. Some how people
think they deserve more then _just 400 people_.

