How Beta List definitely made my day

And not only mine…

It took me two months to make some sort of coating for my idea and give it a chance for existing. When the landing page was finally launched, we had no doubts in awesomeness of our idea. We expected tons of subscribers right after sharing with friends via socials. Ha! We were so naive.
Traffic was close to zero line.

We tried to post some articles at medium, linked to reddit and hacker news. But that led to nothing but some minimal traffic waves to our site. That was a problem and I had to solve it soon.
I’ve decided to publish my startup everywhere possible. But my primary goal was to reach Beta List, ProductHunt, Launching Next and Startup List.

I remember my feelings when Ryan Hoover became the first subscriber. But my joy was premature. ProductHunt ignored us.
It was necessary to do something else. We created our first mockup with Prott. People liked that, we received some positive feedback. At the same time I was asking people at reddit whether the landing page explained the app idea clearly or not. Within one month we made tons of changes in text on the site. But, to be honest, we were desperate to be published by those Big Guys.

But I’ll never forget that Saturday morning. It started as any other morning: checking Google analytics, personal e-mail, socials, morning news, then Gathering e-mail. I don’t know why, but I changed the order and started with Gathering e-mail that Saturday. I saw something that made me jump around the apartment and scream for like five minutes.

“Beta List mentioned you on twitter”.

And in a minute “BOOM SHAKALAKA” e-mail from Marc. In like seven minutes first subscribers appeared. Marc, definitely made our day!
Within two first days after being published by Beta List, Gathering got 400 unique visits and 50 new subscribers.

Monday morning started with more good news. The Prott team posted in socials that we’ve made their day. That was how they made our day!

Everything was simple: traffic to our website from Beta List ended up at Prott’s website (you remember we used their service for our mockup). Everyone was excited. At the end of third day we had 150 new visitors to our site and 20 new subscribers.

Once again I’ve got it that any product has to be as simple and easy as possible. That was the reason why we used Prott for our mockup and Beta List is preferable among similar services. This is how we’re creating Gathering — no unnecessary functions, just solving the problem.

You can also make my day by tweeting this story!

Ivan Hnidko, co-founder of Gathering