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Ask HN: How to consistently generate traffic and new customers for Ramamia?
31 points by jasonlbaptiste on Nov 29, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 48 comments
Hi HN, over the past few months,Mark Bao and I have been trying to figure out how to exactly launch Ramamia, our family sharing app.

Link here: http://staging.ramamia.com

We've been in beta for a number of months and this is our kind of final product. At first, we were going to go for a premium model, as in: the only plan we have is a $40 a year or $5 a month plan, with a 21-day free trial.

We're not sure how we will generate steady incoming traffic. So I thought--why not use free as a marketing tool? So thus--freemium.

We're just not sure about how we are going to generate a stream of incoming traffic for our app, which is a big problem. Should we go freemium or stick with premium?

Keep in mind... with a freemium model, we'd restrict a number of things like # of photos per month, remove video functionality, etc. but there will be still a lower conversion rate to prem... though we might get more leads from 'free' valprop.




First off I'd change the name. It makes no sense, and is hard to pronounce at a glance. Getting people back to your app is step #1 in both engagement and virality, and your name is harmful there. You seem to be about sharing stuff with family (which is inherently viral) so make your name reflect that. You chose some stock photography designed to play in Middle America, make your URL match.

The nice thing with this type of product is that people upload photos and videos of family members mainly to share with other family members, so right there you have inherently viral behavior. Your job now is to make it as frictionless as possible.

Add in those viral channels. Make it easy to share via Facebook or email. I can't sign up for the product to see what you have enabled, but you should have Facebook Connect at the very least. I'd use Google Friend Connect, Yahoo's equivalent, and MSN's as well to make it easy to import contacts and email them a photo or link to a group of photos with one click.

Do you have embeds? Can people embed a family video on their blog trivially from your site? Can they share it via Twitter with a click?

Just spend some time figuring out how your users want to share these things (this is one of those rare instances where simply asking them will return high value info) and make that easy as pie.

So there's your traffic. Freemium seems to be almost a necessity here. I really can't think of an alternative monetization model that makes sense.

Premium-only is death to viral spread. If you decide to go that route, I'd assume you'll have to purchase traffic via AdSense and the like. Get some metrics in place early so you can calculate CPA and RPU. Test with a few thousand bucks worth of ads. If your RPU turns out to be a large multiple of CPA you're set. Just know that with premium only you're aiming for relatively low traffic and relatively high RPU. Not a bad way to go for the right product, but you need to be insanely metrics-driven to make that work.


Wow, Matt—thank you very much for the thorough suggestions.

> First off I'd change the name. It makes no sense, and is hard to pronounce at a glance.

Hell yeah, this has been a gut instinct since day 1. I've been trying to brainstorm new names, but have come up with nothing. I think a name change is a good idea, though, for sure.

> but you should have Facebook Connect at the very least.

Yeah, we're tied into Facebook Connect and Twitter: http://screenshots.markbao.com/a137e44e036028bb19f171c201b2f... -> http://screenshots.markbao.com/082acda74154efb50e52d95a11a1c... -> http://screenshots.markbao.com/b2baae910327fd86f658f2fd29c46...

> Do you have embeds? Can people embed a family video on their blog trivially from your site?

That's an oversight. Thanks, putting that on the imp list.

> Just spend some time figuring out how your users want to share these things (this is one of those rare instances where simply asking them will return high value info) and make that easy as pie.

Definitely a good idea. I think we put together a Ramamia user survey a while ago but never acted upon it for some reason. Probably a good time to get that rolling.

> So there's your traffic. Freemium seems to be almost a necessity here. I really can't think of an alternative monetization model that makes sense.

You're probably right. I had a gut instinct that while Premium would be the easiest and most reliable way to get conversions (no unpredictability in the conversions, in some way) it would be restricting to growth and customer acquisition. I think we've come to the consensus that freemium is probably the way to go.

Thank you again, Matt!


Yeah coming up with names is wicked hard in the age of domain squatters. You'll find one I'm sure.

Even if you go the freemium route, check out AdWords. Getting the right combo of keywords can be a lot of work, but you may just find you can acquire paying users for much less than you make off of them. Especially since you're presumably using subscription billing here. And it's highly scalable, once you find the right audience you can probably buy them by the truckload.


We did a quick run with AdWords and it turned out to be total crap. The volume of searches for stuff like "family website" was abysmal and the CPCs for stuff like "family photos" was out of the water. So, yeah. We're definitely looking to do it, but not without some conversion % estimates.


I think we'd be better off giving families an option for a "public page". Focusing on SEO over SEM would be a better long term goal. The CAC and conversion numbers didn't make sense with the small test we did for SEM. then again, that might be a bad way of looking at it since we used such a small sample.


Don't forget to try bustaname.com when looking for an available domain. I've gotten lots of good domains on there over the years.


Let your data be your guide on this, but I think a lot of these comments are "solving the problems of technically inclined twenty-something males". For example, I predicted without even reading that Twitter adoption is so low as to be negligible. The data referenced elsewhere on this thread suggests that, indeed, .5% of customers are using it. Don't spend engineering time catering to .5% of customers unless you have a darn good reason to. (In addition to Twitter, the vast majority of your customers don't have blogs. Unlike Twitter, though, I think there is a built-in wonderful reason to support bloggers even if they're a tiny fraction of your users: they give great links for SEO purposes.)

Easily importing contacts from their Yahoo email or Google email, which are products this market actually uses, is a wonderful idea though.

Have you thought deeply about your SEO strategy yet, as opposed to your paid search strategy? I think you'll find that search results like "family photos" are going to be insanely competitive. Think long tail -- put a blog on your site and start writing articles along the general lines of "How do I send photos to my family?" You would be flabbergasted how many people in your market do natural language queries. (The long tail search queries at my site is quite amusing.)


I agree the name needs fixing.

> Freemium seems to be almost a necessity here. I really can't think of an alternative monetization model that makes sense.

Families may find comfort in knowing it's a paid service, since they are uploading personal photos and information. It is harder to trust something new that doesn't have a clear way of staying afloat.

>Do you have embeds? Can people embed a family video on their blog trivially from your site? Can they share it via Twitter with a click?

This might be useful for marketing. But I'd make sure your market actually use blogs and twitter to post personal family details before investing in building that.


> Families may find comfort in knowing it's a paid service

This was one of our arguments for a fully premium service. Don't know how much weight this holds.

> But I'd make sure your market actually use blogs and twitter to post personal family details before investing in building that.

For Twitter, I can divulge some details from the database... 26 out of 6236 user rows have connected their account to Twitter, for a percentage of 0.416%.


Be careful not to pollute your data with people just "kicking the tyres" of your website - I imagine you have many users who create a profile to get a look and never return.


This is awesome feedback. Sorry for delay, was driving.

Name- Very good chance we'll change it. Just haven't found anything we love yet.

Viral loops- Some of that basic stuff is there. A lot more need to be added. Since we didn't know if we wanted to go premium only, we wanted to hold off on implementing them.

Freemium- I think we're going to go this route after playing around with time limited trials over the past month.


If you really believe your offering value, then my vote is for premium right away. Freemium isn't really a marketing tool, its more of a business model.

A 30-60 day free trials or 30% off for a year might help grab early adopters. Of course it will always come down to trial and error. I'd launch it asap and see what works for your market.

For pricing your users know better then us!

Regarding traffic, I'd try SEM with some nice landing pages to find the right marketing message.

Besides that, the top of this chart shows the other online marketing approaches. http://www.flickr.com/photos/500hats/577630547/sizes/o/


Sweet graphic, thanks for that.

Hmm, I've heard it both ways. 'Freemium isn't a business model, it's a marketing tool!' 'Freemium isn't a marketing tool, it's a business model! '

The problem is that we'd like to launch (since we're doing this big press launch and stuff) with a more perfected version of our model, so we want to find the best way that works first before launching, you know?

Thanks very much!


I'd recommend going straight to premium with 30-day trial. Its too much work to segment and manage the fremium feature set.


What do people think about offering $x/yr and $y/mo options? When I see $y/mo in these situations, it reminds me of mobile phone billing scams. My gut feel is that you'd only want $x/yr in this situation. Do Flickr have a monthly option? From memory, they just have 1 year, 2 years and then just mention a monthly cost to demonstrate how cheap it is?


I lean the same way in this situation. You may find giving one choice gets better results than making the user think too much.


>Hmm, I've heard it both ways. 'Freemium isn't a business model, it's a marketing tool!'

I'd say it's a marketing tool if no one else has sold what your offering for free before; so the idea of it being free is engaging and people tell their friends

For a business model I think it only makes sense for products that are easily consumed and need to be accessible with little commitment.

> we want to find the best way that works first before launching

I'm with Steve Blank on this one. You won't find answers in the building. You have to go out and find what people are willing to pay for.


Why not do both?

I'm hustling to get my new app out and I plan to use a kind of "hybrid" system. Perhaps it has a name but the premise is just that you have to attach VALUE to whatever it is you are giving away. If you price something as "FREE" and then give it away, then the user does not feel like he's really getting anything. If you price something for $200.00, and then give it away, well they just got $200 for FREE - AWESOME!!

So my current plan of attack is have 3 pricing tiers that all costs money. Then as of now, I'm in "beta" so I have this huge "sale" "this month only" where all users get "PLUS accounts FREE FOR LIFE!". And clearly right there, Plus accounts normally cost $100/yr, so I'm reasoning that a customer would derive more value from signing up than if I had just called the Plus plan "free" with a fat ass zero for the price.

So in other words. Be a premium product so everyone understands you are worth something, and then have sales, and reasons to give those oh-so-valuable plans away.

HTH


Heh, I read about this tactic in the Yes! book. It's a great one. I think it'd be a great tactic to do for a short term marketing run, but labeling a Basic product as $30 a year BUT YOURS FREE!!!1one for the long term might not be so reputable, right?

Thanks for your input!


Yeah, as a once-upon-a-time dreamhost customer, I was pretty annoyed to have paid $119 for a years hosting only to see that they discount it 98% every now and then. Definitely not a good feeling.

I think what I'm thinking is more a long the lines of "actually" giving away a non-free plan. So whatever your entry level paid plan is, just lower it a little more, and then be prepared to charge money for it, but anytime you want to do a marketing push, give it away for free. So its not going to be like some secretly free plan. The whole point is to give something of value away for free. I think all customers would appreciate that.

Lastly, I like how 37 signals has a lowly-advertised ass-basic free plan. It's still free, but they make it a point to really imply that "it aint all that great". I like this because it implicitly reminds every customer that deals with 37 signals that their product costs money for a reason. It's kind of like thinking about it backwards...why would I think this company is worth anything if they give everything away for free? Actually...thats EXACTLY what I think about dreamhost now. I have to say back in the days I thought dh was a good company because it was better than the godaddy account I came from. But I've come to realize they absolutely whore out their plans (98% wtf) and its literally at a direct cost to their full-paying customers.. (shared hosting) I am officially not a fan of dh and I am that burned enough to leave a negative comment about them in a public forum as I'm doing now ... Give your customers something of value!!


Do something that is pressworthy outside of just 'x startup has launched.' Playing off current events is always great, but an even better way to gain mindshare among normal people is to get reporters to cite your company any time they talk about related issues.

The hard work is figuring out what reporters need that you can provide. They love statistics, and you can always try to get quoted as an expert source on something related to your company.

This kind of thing will get your name out there and get you the kind of traffic (and links) you want rather than short bursts of disinterested blog readers.


do you guys really have 3,000 users? Or is that a marketing number? If yes, then you guys should just focus on building a viral loop


Admin stats page screenshot: http://i50.tinypic.com/2dwcg1s.png


That's about 4 photos per user. Doesn't seem like a lot. How many of your users have over 100 photos, 200, 300? Those are the ones you want to concentrate on. Ask them how to make the service better. They are your power users. Most everyone else is just a lurker.


I've always liked the idea of a freemium system.

I think one way that could really help it spread is to incorporate some kind of affiliate program. For every paying user that the person brings in, they get X% off for a premium account that month. Referrals are likely to be huge in your market.


Thanks! We have this implemented already. If a user refers another family that becomes a paying family, then they get 25% off their yearly price—for life.


I have been a Ramamia user for several months and I hate to say it, but I think your execution may be holding you back. It's not flawless and it needs to be. In order to become viral you need raving fans and based upon the experience with my family you don't have that (yet).

I described my family's needs and got the recommendation for Ramamia here at hn. I think it's exactly what we need and I'm happy with it for the most part, but haven't seen the same feedback from my family members. Ramamia satisfies my 2 most important requirements perfectly: users don't need logins and passwords, and the site is maintained by anyone in the family, not just me.

I know this thread is not for specific feedback and I know that I'm a beta user, but I thought I'd share it anyway since it's so closely related. You guys have also done great work; you deserve to see my feedback in a thread like this instead of an email in case anyone else wants to build upon it...

- About half my family members (45 people) have never contributed to the site. I don't even know if they've ever even visited. I suppose this is normal, but I don't know.

- The biggest complaint is ease of use. Many members have left the comment "Enter a comment..." because they clicked the "Add Comment" button before entering their text. Then they're embarrassed and don't try again.

- When a link is emailed to someone, that link takes them to the post referenced, not the main page heading. All they can see is that post. It's not obviously apparent that by clicking on our family's name that you can go "Home". You should either put a giant "Home" button at the top, or better yet, just have all links go directly to the Home page. Chances are the referenced link is right at the top anyway.

- Although it's possible to attach text to a picture, it's not apparent how to attach text to an album, or if you even can.

- People have figured out how to post pictures or text, but not both in the same posting.

- The comments are not threaded (like here at hn) so it's tough to ask and answer questions and have conversations.

- Lots of people have forgotten how to get to the site. You might want to consider a giant sign, "In order to come back here to Ramamia, just click any link in any email from us."

- Some family members want to download and share pictures. I have explained that that's not what this site is for. Then they say, "Well then, we should use <xyz> instead." I don't know how to respond to them.

- I have 2 accounts for our family (just to see what everyone else sees). Several times I have posted but not gotten an email to the other account. I suspect this was a temporary glitch; it hasn't happened again.

Some of this may sound like nit-picking, but you really need to make it idiot proof. They keep having problems where I would never imagine. A family website must always be prepared for non-sophisticated users.

Also, I may be expecting too much of my family members. Maybe a lot of them just don't care. I suspect that's the nature of this beast, too.

I have been meaning to share this with you guys, but you know how it is, you get busy and then... It's just as well; use this community for feedback.

I don't want it to sound like it's all problems. Many family members have shared great pictures and many of us are thrilled. Several cousins have seen childhood pictures of their parents that they never saw before.

You guys are doing great work on something that really is important. You should have raving fans; I hope you get them.

If you contact me offline, I'll share email addresses with my family members that have had the most difficulty. Feedback from them may help you more than I ever could.


I'm not a Ramamia user, so please excuse it if my comments seem ignorant; they are. I'm just thinking about what my family would want/need. If it's slick enough, we might become users one day. As far as I'm concerned, you'll have to beat the MobileMe/iPhoto combination, which is still very much one-way, but extremely easy to use.

Some family members want to download and share pictures. I have explained that that's not what this site is for.

This is a must. Save the original files when they're uploaded, even if you then show downscaled versions to users on the web interface: have a prominent "download printable version" link/button. Also: have a button for downloading a whole album as a zip file or whatever. You're charging people, so suck up the extra traffic and storage.

Killer: have an "order a [framed/unframed] print of this" button for those who don't have a photo printer and glossy paper. Interface with a third-party printing service for this, get commission for it.

Speaking of iPhoto: importing albums straight from iPhoto would be fantastic. This is technically possible from a Java Applet or maybe via Flash, but prepare to sink quite a bit of effort into it if you decide to try this. Let me know (email in profile) if you need any pointers.


Ed, once again many thanks. This is a gold mine. It's hard to seem thankful enough via a text box, but I hope it shows :-).

I think our biggest problem is that we're giving it mediocre effort. We're on that cusp of doing something great, but we keep treating it like this side project. That means the really small details like the ones you mentioned get overlooked or the smart viral loops get left out. I've always wanted to take Ramamia to a higher level, but I think I get worried about the what-ifs/am i passionate enough/ can it make money/etc aspect.


You're the one that keeps saying it's a side project. Asshole.

;)


haha, I know im kind of being a pussy and doing it to cover my ass. You also have like 4 bajillion other projects! It's more of a do I want to do this full time for passion reasons? I'm pretty certain if I went balls to the wall on the marketing+product feedback side, it could be a success.

Mark and I are comfortable enough with HN to have founder discussions out in the open.


edw519 has been using Ramamia from the start and has always been an amazing contributor of suggestions for the app. For that, Jason and I thank you.

> - About half my family members (45 people) have never contributed to the site. I don't even know if they've ever even visited. I suppose this is normal, but I don't know.

That's a big family. Hmm. In the past we had "yo your family didn't share anything this week, share some stuff" emails every week. We analyzed it and it generated a lot of pageviews. I thought it was complete rubbish, since it was annoying to get one of these a week; Jason thought it was great for getting traffic. We're still not sure how to deal with the activity problem, but we're looking into it.

> - The biggest complaint is ease of use. Many members have left the comment "Enter a comment..." because they clicked the "Add Comment" button before entering their text. Then they're embarrassed and don't try again.

Yeah, we've seen a lot of this. http://screenshots.markbao.com/b51c1333e1cbf8c859a1dab023b75... We're probably going to create a throbbing thing that says "You're supposed to enter a comment here ->" or something.

> - When a link is emailed to someone, that link takes them to the post referenced, not the the main page heading. All they can see is that post. It's not obviously apparent that by clicking on our family's name that you can go "Home". You should either put a giant "Home" button at the top, or better yet, have all links just go to the Home page. Chances are the referenced link is right at the top anyway.

Huh, really? That's interesting. Perhaps we'll underline the family name and see how well that works. The only ways this won't work is in special cases like weekly emails or something.

> - Although it's possible to attach text to a picture, it's not apparent how to attach text to an album, or if you even can.

Like a description thing? We wanted to keep it simple, but this is a pretty valid oversight. Adding.

> - People have figured out how to post pictures or text, but not both in the same posting.

Hmm. Didn't know this was something people wanted. Will look into it. We need to do some user surveys soon.

> - The comments are not threaded (like here at hn) so it's tough to ask and answer questions and have conversations.

Good suggestion, but I'm not sure if the wide amount of Ramamia users will have a significant gain versus confusion with threaded comments. A lot of them are rather used to email, so linear conversations seem to be where it's at.

> - Lots of people have forgotten how to get to the site. You might want to consider a giant sign, "In order to come back here to Ramamia, just click any link in any email from us."

Good idea. You know, we were thinking of moving to a password-only kind of thing, where people would specify a password instead of our nice but overall somewhat confusing login link. Have the login links worked out for your family?

> - Some family members want to download and share pictures. I have explained that that's not what this site is for. Then they say, "Well then, we should use <xyz> instead." I don't know how to respond to them.

I'll put downloading an archive of photos in the icebox!

> Some of this may sound like nit-picking, but you really need to make it idiot proof

That's one of the big problems I had while working on Ramamia... trying to make everything as easy as possible. It's incredibly hard and I agree—people are running into problems I would never anticipate. It's WTF-inducing.

Great to hear your family is liking Ramamia overall, though. All of this is going directly into Pivotal Tracker. Thank you edw, for being a great supporter and contributor.


For the comment issue, why not just visibly disable the add comment button until the text field is changed?


or change the text to 'Submit Comment'


Just a quick thought, the holiday season (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas Gifts) is when a lot digital cameras are sold (especially DSLRs this year). You might be able to get some traffic (premium) by writing a blog post on tips on taking family photos, different DSLR settings, poses to try, etc.

This is my thought on how to target consumers who just bought/received a fancy camera and need a way to share the thousands of photos they took. That's the quality traffic you want. There might be other ways to target this group?


you might find http://www.startups.com useful for these types of questions.


I find that http://answers.onstartups.com/ has a more technical audience, with better quality Qs and As


You have a changing feature area on your front page. Please either add next/prev buttons and an easy way to navigate it or break it out into normal HTML. It currently changes faster than I can comfortably read.

Edit: Oh, you have navigation - but it is visually detached from the feature area (looks attached to the area above) so I missed it.


Agreed, it's too fast and confusing.


Here's one idea im just shooting out there for the hell of it. Seriously, it might be absolutely retarded and just designate it as so with comments: Microtransactions. Give people x amount of free videos and x amount of free photo albums. After that, they pay for each one posted (something really small).


It's not all bad. You can buy "credits" and use them for whatever you want, even send them to other family members so they can post on your family page too without paying anything.


hmm, really really interesting. kind of the pay by the drink model. the credits could be pooled for the entire family. eventually could be used for things such as virtual gifts. give credits for incentives such as inviting your family, sharing an item,etc. make credits purchasable in $5 packs and give a few for free to start.


Clickable: http://staging.ramamia.com


Like i've suggested before, Add a significant bottom margin to the footer. there's no reason it should be squished up like that. otherwise, looking great :)


Looks nice, who does your graphic design?


I did the graphic design.


with regards to the decision you have to make about fremium/premium etc there is one thing I think you need to consider that I can't see anybody else here has mentioned.

If a whole family sign up to your site and like it enough to use it they will probably become long term users. After all it would be a pain in the ass for them to try and collectively move to another service.

With this in mind, if you go the premium route, it may be in your interests to consider offering a more substantial sign-up discount - a 21 day free trial wouldn't excite me to try out your product.

Good luck in any case and keep HN up to date with how you guys are doing :)


The Jones family name you use in your screenshots has some bad connotations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses




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