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?
I think you're getting the wrong point. TechCrunch is not a good source for acquiring non-technical users. However it can be good for getting your name out to investors (being mentioned in TechCrunch is better then never being mentioned in TechCrunch), SEO, and general brand recognition. So yes, don't try to get on TechCrunch to grow your users, but it's not a bad part of a larger media strategy.
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.
I agree. Also, it turns out that improving their product involves marketing. I went to the site and I had no idea why I would want to sign up. How is it different/better than all the existing coupon/deal sites? The "about" link is below the fold, and on my laptop screen I had no way of knowing that there was anything to scroll down to. Chrome doesn't show a scroll bar until you try to scroll.
Really depends on who your audience is. If the Techcrunch readership isn't your audience, those conversion rates aren't necessarily indicative of anything.
Please do, I'd love to read it. Your blog is the most honest account of entrepreneurship I've seen. ("Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit and Maybe Fun" was one of my favorite startup reads ever.)
At a previous startup I cofounded, we had an incredible launch. TechCrunch, NYTimes (online and print), Gizmodo, etc. -- it was incredible! We still pivoted a few months later. If anything, the press helped us justify holding on to something that wasn't working.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Couldn't agree more. The Yipit landing page may as well be asking for credit card details.
Show your users some value before you rape of their email address - offer them something they want and they'll happily give you an email address.
The goal isn't to collect a bunch of email addresses. It's to have active customers. You're losing potential customers by not showing what's on offer first.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?