After the 'successful' transition from Hummingbird's Landing Page to our Private Beta with a waiting list down the block and around the corner, I've been asked the same question more times than I care to answer:
"Josh, how did you do it? What are you doing that we're not?"
This is an attempt to spend an hour on a lazy Sunday to answer that question... to the best of my ability. Don't worry, I'm %#$@# awesome.
I'd imagine at this point you're thinking "Josh, you really ARE awesome. And Hummingbird is a serene, beautiful name... I have to know, what is Hummingbird and where do I signup?!"
Calm down, you're embarrassing yourself. The Hummingbird Engine looks at your rating history to calculate your taste vector, it then uses this taste vector to determine which anime series are closely aligned with your interests. How smart did that sound? My brilliant cofounder came up with that, but I copy-pasted it, so give me some credit too. For those of us that aren't undergraduates at one of the most vigorous and exclusive colleges in the world, Hummingbird is sort of like Rotten Tomatoes had a baby with Netflix's Recommendation Engine, and that baby really loves anime.
Anyways, now that the intro is out of the way, let's get to the meat and potatoes, how did we get all of these juicy, innocent users to sign up for a beta invite to our product? Ghost magic, lewd service exchanges, a deal with the devil? None of the above. I'm going to break it down into a list, because:
- Who doesn't love lists?
- If you don't love lists, you're not the kind of person I want to share my advice with anyway and that's how you weed people out of your life.
Please don't consider this a 'checklist' for your own endeavors, not because I don't want you to succeed, but because there's no substitute for your own testing and experience. Use my insights to better guide your own, not replace them.
- BE AWESOME, SHIP SOMETHING
Your idea rocks, right? Of course it does, you don't need ME to tell you that. You do, however need random, heartless strangers to tell you that, because it will save you a LOT of time and soul crushing pain if your idea is a bust. I spent 4 hours designing and coding the Hummingbird landing page. We used Launchrock to collect the emails, embedding their widget into our custom form. They've since asked me to write a guest post on my process so you can keep your jeans on, we won't be diving into any code today. The landing page was simple. A tagline, a brief description and an email capture form. Nothing fancy.
Do you need to spend 4 hours designing and coding your own custom landing page? Absolutely not. I, however, do this for a living AND I have 3 children, any excuse to escape that circus is a good one (only kidding, I love my children...)
Think of your landing page as your first line of defense against the monster that is wasted time. You need to validate your idea before you do ANYTHING else. Asking your friends and family what they think isn't validating your idea, they're going to lie to you because they love you. You need cold, hard numbers.
- BE EVERYWHERE, GO WHERE YOUR USERS ARE
I know, I know, easier said than done. Chances are though, you already know where to start looking. If your startup leans more on the tech side of things, your first stop could be HackerNews, otherwise, consider Reddit.
Hummingbird isn't exactly HackerNews material, so we started off with the r/anime subreddit. There's a subreddit for just about everything, if you're not able to find one relevant to your idea, there's a good chance your computer's not turned on.
Once you've found your subreddit, a quick sidebar check shows you what kind of userbase you're looking at:
[ibimage==23248==Large==http://www.reddit.com/r/anime==self==ibimage_align-center]
Our subreddit of choice was sitting right around ~90K readers. Not huge on the reddit scale of things, but a nice, healthy size. The evening I finished our landing page, we posted to the r/anime subreddit and I went to bed, hoping for the best. The thing you need to understand about sites like HN and reddit is that you're not guaranteed traffic, but what you will get (particularly on reddit) is honest feedback. Generally these users are pretty blunt and to the point, I'm pretty sure some of these guys call off work just to practice hurting your feelings. This is why I love validating on reddit above anything else, if your idea sucks, they'll tell you. If they love your idea, you couldn't ask for a more loyal fanbase.
Remember what I said about the hurt feelings? Yeah, they tore us apart. A lot of users didn't like us just because we were asking for their email address, initially, we had second thoughts about the idea, we had a LOT of bad feedback and the negativity was palpable, you could taste that shit in the air. Validation approved, we were ready to start coding. Oddly enough, we still received over 1,000+ beta registrations overnight, what the hell? This is why taking a numbers approach is so important. The negative people generally have valuable insight that you should listen to, but you need to keep in mind that these people also happen to generally be the most vocal. Keep your chin up and check those numbers before you get that cold shower ready. 1,000 signups was proof to us that we were onto something, the negative feedback gave us a clear guide on where we should be 'pivoting' to. The beauty of this is as this point, we didn't even have a single line of code for Hummingbird. It wasn't so much 'pivoting' or 'refining' what we already had as it was, just getting started.
[ibimage==23249==Large==none==self==ibimage_align-center] - BE REAL, YOU'RE NOT APPLE AND THAT'S A GOOD THING
One of the biggest things that bit us in the ass early on was how professional our design was. Everything was super clean and polished, and we used sexy words like "Sophisticated", and "Modern". That was exactly what our users didn't want to hear. Why? Because our rough edges played against us at that point. Transparency is your friend. When you level with your users and you talk to them like you would your friends (Some of you may need to use moderation, but you get the point, cut the corporate talk.) you build rapport in ways you would have never imagined. You're opening up the doors for your users to become evangelists, everyone wants to root for the underdog. If you want to get noticed, don't be so polished.
When we stopped talking in the third person and slinging out buzzwords, amazing things like this started to happen:
[ibimage==23250==Large==none==self==ibimage_align-center]
[ibimage==23251==Large==none==self==ibimage_align-center]
[ibimage==23252==Large==none==self==ibimage_align-center] - BE SMART, TEST UNTIL YOUR BRAIN HURTS
We're constantly testing the Hummingbird homepage, and services like Optimizely make it dead simple. Unless 30% of the users hitting your landing page are sending you hundred dollar bills and money shots by post mail, you should be testing like there's no tomorrow. The biggest response I hear when I say this to people is:
"Yeah, we don't really have a lot of traffic, we'll A/B test when we do."
[ibimage==23254==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-left]NOPE! NO! NO! NO!
You should be testing NOW while you don't have a lot of traffic. If you have pathetic traffic, drop $5 a day on google ads and push traffic your way. The importance of testing while things are slow is so that you can take full advantage of that TechCrunch post you've been having wet dreams about. When it finally happens, do you want to be the one admitting how low your conversion was? Don't drop the ball when it's important, practice now, ya fool!
- BE EMPATHETIC, UNDERSTAND WHAT YOUR USERS WANT, THEY'LL TELL YOU
Before you cry "Foul!" I understand that I'm coming back to a point I touched on earlier. Short of punching you in the face, I don't actually know any other way of stressing JUST how important understanding what your users REALLY want is. It's literally the backbone of any great idea, the problem in the question "What problem are you trying to solve?", a simple question with an answer that is always complicated. Hummingbird is very different from it had started out as. How did we get there? We listened to the positive feedback, the negative feedback and the analytical feedback. We didn't do surveys because when asked, users rarely know what they want, or they give you the answers they think you want to hear. surveys suck. Don't waste your time. What you should be doing is getting your hands dirty and talking with your users, it always surprises me when I'm talking to a colleague (that's a fancy word for someone I don't like enough to be friends with) and they explain that their users sign up and never come back to use their site yet it never occured to them to simply ASK the users what they didn't like. Send out a quick email along the lines of:
"Hey, I noticed you signed up for AWESOMESTARTUPIDEA but you haven't used the site. Do you need help with anything or did you run into any bugs? Let me know and I'll get them sorted out ASAP!"
That message sucks. I'm not a copywriter and neither are you, but you don't need to be. You need to make a personal connection, that's what this is all about, one human talking to another. That means use your real name and your own ugly mug, not "Megan" that hot brunette with the headset from your favorite stock photo site.
Listen to the bitching, listen to the praise and pay attention to what your users do when they're actually on your site. You need to really make an effort to show your users that you care about their problems in the same way that you care about your best friends problems. That's the magic behind our success so far with Hummingbird. We found a pain point and we really, truly listened to what our users are saying. We don't have a brilliant marketing strategy, we haven't spent hundreds or thousands on advertisements (We've spent about ~$200 spent on ads to date) marketing is important. We're the underdog now and our users are rooting for us, our largest source of traffic is direct and referral, by a landslide, these are people becoming evangelists for our vision, they want to see it succeed as much as we do. Below is our traffic sources for the last month our landing page has been live:
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There it is. My very first blog post... ANYWHERE (Sorry, StarterLeague, I was a bad student!) I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, promote it! Also, if you happen to see Troy Henikoff around, do me a favor and tell him how awesome I am, it couldn't hurt to mention I'm also HILARIOUS.
One last demand, if you enjoyed reading this (or didn't), shoot me a tweet. This ended up taking much more than an hour, it'd be nice to know the time wasn't wasted.
