The “30 Day startup” experiment was executed for the launch of Slingbot Twitter Social Marketing Platform
Disclaimer: The first few videos are a little slow. I promise it becomes more entertaining, especially once we start making revenue.
*Hint* month one success metrics are in video 30.
Concept behind Video Blog:
Build a Twitter engagement tool called Slingbot.
Launch it.
Gain traction within 30 days.
Start making revenue.
While living out of an office space…
After 30 days of testing, growth hacking, and bad hygiene, we are going to drive from Providence, RI to San Francisco, CA to raise a seed round. (Staying in San Francisco)
I don’t like reading/watching boring videos so I wont be offended if you skip around. Choose which you would like to watch keeping in mind some of the videos are extremely informative, yet not so exciting.
Sign up’s will be at the bottom of each post for sharing ☺
Thanks for watching my journey everyone and enjoy the ride!
Preparing for a growth hack using The Five Dollar Startup experiment I published in November 2013.
Final design of Slingbot being completed within 24 hours.
10 beta testers providing feedback. (friends and active twitter users)
Growth hack prepped and ready to go.
Re-design of Slingbot is complete.
Beta testers giving basic feedback on:
Spelling checks
Getting Quotes
Responsive Design
Payment processing
Pricing model
Soft Launch and Growth Hack push #1
Launching on the same day as Jelly (Biz Stone’s startup) We still managed to start bringing on users.
After a short launch celebration, we finished the first push for acquiring users using; Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News, and Facebook.
Followed 8,000 people on Twitter.
Tomorrow we are working on emailing our Gmail contacts as well as the next Twitter push.
Growth hack push #2
Divided 10 Twitter accounts between two of us on 3 IP addresses and two cell phones.
Followed 15,000 people on Twitter across the 10 targeted accounts
400 unique visitors generating 43 active users. (10% conversion)
Feedback loop is exploding with comments from satisfied users helping us gather data for content marketing.
Was deleted due to inconsistencies in what I was saying and writing. The problem with recording late, is your brain turns to mush and I was saying different things than what I was writing. Derp.
The point of Hack & Hustle is to provide 100% transparency, and I was losing my place and messing it up. It WILL happen again. You have been warned.
Daily uniques: 314
Growth hack push night #3
First week was successful in acquiring our first 150 users.
Analytics:
1,500 (total) unique visitors
4,000 page views
17.5% return visitors
88% of users from USA
Monetization will come this week (or not) have to send newsletters to keep early adopters in the loop about what’s going on with the site.
Day 8 — Viral on Reddit
Daily Uniques: 1,692
After sending Slingbot links viral through linking on Imgur and Reddit we received over 2,000 uniques visitors within 7 hours.
My Reddit Karma went from 17 points to 5,100 within the 7 hours of starting my meme posts.
I posted 10 meme’s to imgur, shared with their community, as well as Reddit and 3 of the meme’s took off getting my account TheSteveMcG to the number 65 ranking accounts on all of Reddit.
I am posting a blog post on Hack & Hustle with the data and screen shots I took to document the hack. Enjoy.
Sent out our first newsletter/update/thank you email to our first users.
We divided and customized our user emails into 4 buckets. (for testing subject lines, open rates, conversions, ect.)
1. Users that signed up but did not create a campaign.
2. Users that ran one campaign
3. Users that ran two campaigns
4. Users that are getting INSANE conversions and results for the service.
Update email’s subject line was titled “Slingbot Loves You.”
(we chose to follow Hotmail’s love you campaign.)
At the end of every email we wrote:
“P.S. Slingbot loves you. If you love what we are doing, share with your friends.”
After Sebastian (co-founder) built bots for out twitter accounts we are now done with the Twitter growth hack. Our 10 twitter accounts are automated and driving traffic.
Total Twitter growth hack results: Followed a total of a little under 40,000 people over the course of 7 days. (originally planned for it to take 5 days at following 1,000 people a day, but we ran into problems.) Accounts getting suspended. I will be posting about that separately when all the data is displayed so people can actually read it.
DISCOVERED GREAT TRAFFIC DRIVER >Imgur the simple image sharer!
As mentioned in my post, I have managed to engage users on Imgur in a non sales driven way. Becoming part of a community is key for all early stage startups. Community and networking is all you have, until you convert them into users.
Building an audience by not sounding “salesy” and talking about cool shit that people actually enjoy reading will create return and valuable users faster.
Short clip for a short day.
Today we are scheduling meetings and getting office space in SF.
We were able to obtain FREE office space in San Francisco, CA with a growth hack (promo code) from a notorious currently Boston based growth hacker, Maneesh Sethi. Check out his site Hack the System when you get the chance. Some great info and hacks on there.
Today is dedicated predominately to collecting and analyzing the data fromSlingbot’s first week. We also are making it a point to organize the shitload of feedback from our first group of users. Taking two steps back to prepare for our email (#2) asking people to start PAYING for the software. (two steps forward)
Test, Build, Learn, Repeat. Live by it.
Driving traffic from Craigslist. (blog post on Hack & Hustle)
Quora visits: 38
Meetup visits: 44
Hack & Hustle visits: 46
Google Organic: 72
Team decided on running a freemium model. (Free to use up to a certain amount of impressions.)
New iteration tomorrow:
Two packages that will go live;
“Sling” ($9.99 for 10,000 monthly impressions)
“Crossbow” ($29.99 for 20,000 monthly impression)
Third package coming over the next few weeks will be the $99 “Trebuchet.” We still have some brainstorming to do for those features.
Data Analysis.
Always know data is king when it comes to driving traffic and scaling any startup.
Biggest acquisition channels
Imgur: 3,269
Twitter: 949
Channels with best conversion rate (sign ups):
Meetup: 44
Quora: 69
Quality over quantity in the beginning is what differentiates startups from large companies. THAT IS PART OF YOUR VALUE AS A STARTUP.
We are focusing on testing and getting feedback from the users that have signed up. Not people that have come and helped fuck up the bounce rate.
Sling and Crossbow packages coming out within 24 hours.
Content is also king (alongside data) for every Marketer/Growth hacker.
Distributing your content correctly to reap the full benefits is another story all together.
I am writing a “How to Medium” post will be followed by a “How to Quora” post.
Day 13
Daily Unique Visitors: 220
Medium growth hack.
Cross posting “hacks” to Twitter, Linkedin, Quora, FiveDollarStartups, and Hack & Hustle.
Potential partnership with a Toronto based startup. Don’t want to mention them due to nothing is 100% until it is 100%.
Tip: Don’t talk about partnerships, pivots, or funding until it is final. (even then it’s still not the best idea to talk about.)
When you mention potential company shifting info like this, and it doesn’t work out, (which it probably will not) people assume you are a scatter brained wantrepreneur and all credibility is lost. Just don’t, it’s pretty simple.
CHANGING THE INTRO TO THESE VIDEO’S. (saying ‘UM’ is driving readers and myself fucking crazy.)
I will start the videos with “Hey Slingbot fans, It is Day ____ and _____.”
Does that work for everyone?
Ok great.
Problem solved.
SLINGBOT VERSION 2 JUST WENT LIVE AT 1AM.
We will be contacting users Monday (Day 15) to monetize the product! Hopefully.
It is now freemium, so it is 100% free to sign up, test out, and use.
Users will have the option (up selling via email) to upgrade to our packages giving them an overall better experience and making it easier to acquire them. (users like free)
Day 14 — REVENUE!
Daily Uniques: 231
REVENUE!!
We had two organic subscribers sign up to upgrade their Slingbot accounts within 2 hours of the new iteration going live.
They also subscribed before the initial marketing push for upgraded accounts started! (luck plays a large factor into starting a company peeps, know that)
Upon new iteration going live, the back-end “sprung leaks,” for lack of a better word.
We (Mikey) are working on plugging the holes, while not promoting Slingbot to be safe.
After smoothing over everything in the backend and the okay from Mikey (my co-founder) We will convert a percentage of our existing users via email, and execute our biggest marketing push yet!
Converting free users to paid users will be done through up selling in the background. Meaning we will email users instead of cutting them off when their “free trail” has ended. (p.s. The service is free, so a free trial is a selling technique, and a good one at that.)
Many startups take this route to monetization because it is honest, and your can develop great relationships with your early adopters.
Note: Early adopters will be your best marketers. Spreading the word for you to their networks. So be nice to them and remain as close as possible to them nurturing the relationship.
Moral is high when revenue is being made.
Celebrate small victories.
You are not a corporation, so don’t act like one.
Half way mark.
Current users: 321 (minus 40 beta testers) => 281 active users
Subscriptions: 3 (organic) subscribers: 2 @ $10, 1 @ $50
Campaigns: 981 (aprox 3/person)
Total favorites: 258,462 (yes, we have favorited over a quarter of a million tweets)
Total conversions: 11,625 (followers gained by users.)
Pumping the breaks due to the backend being somewhat “broken.”
Prepping emails to be sent.
Content marketing takes time, but it is a long term solution to inbound organic traffic.
Inbound helps for days like the past couple where we have not promoted at all due to back end issues, and 200+ people still visit the site.
Great safety net. (if your content doesn’t suck)
Meetings tomorrow with investors I have prior relationship with. (Under promise over deliver.) Great guys, that know we are data geeks.
Important to simply touch base every few weeks to let them know you are still being scrappy and getting traction.
Team is excited to see our conversion to paid users this week.
Re-built the entire backend.
After having to upgrade our servers twice in the first 14 days due to traffic overload, we are now getting to the point of being “SAFE-ISH”
This is not trying sounding cocky. We actually had to upgrade our servers twice.
Mikey completely rebuilt the entire backend, payments, and kept plugging holes in the code as users created them. If you see Mikey on the side of the street. Tell him “Good job Mikey.” (Be sure to not tell him who you are, and run away afterwards.)
We will have upgrade subscriptions turned back on sometime tomorrow night. Hopefully.
Putting together a marketing “hack” for the end of this week to convert more users to paid.
Custom emails are important.
You don’t have to send them one by one, but use simple scripts to customize your mass email to users. Even a first name can make the difference in a conversion and not.
With our 10 fully automated (not automated with Slingbot) accounts on Twitter we have been driving constant traffic. (one of the reasons for our server issues.)
Goal has been set: 20-30 paid subscribers by the end of our first month!
Under promise. Over perform. ESPECIALLY for personal goals.
Sign up and support Slingbot!
Emails sent to 50 of 350 users.
We divided our users into 6 different buckets based on the amount of impressions their campaigns obtained. This is to test different emails.
Group 1: >50 impressions
Group 2: 50-100 impressions
Group 3: 100-150 impressions
Group 4: 150-200 impressions
Group 5: 200-250 impressions
Group 6: 250 + impressions (rock star category)
We sent our first 50 “upgrade” emails to a percentage of the “rock star performers.
The reason behind getting top performers converted first is to learn from their success and provide tips to people who are learning.
Sign up and support Slingbot
Emails sent to almost half of our active users.
User count: 436 users
Favorites: 347,702
Conversions: 7,889
Campaigns: 1,342
Conversion rate average: 3-5%
Sign up and support Slingbot
All emails sent.
Developing ideas for internal virality. (example contest for amount of impressions.
Funneling users using imgur hack.
Phone and Skype meetings with people in San Francisco.
Planning our living and working strategies for when we get over there.
Already have free space at Regus. (7 locations within the city of San Francisco)
Friends and fans have been expressing interest in coming with us. (funny)
Re-engaging people with Twitter hack from beginning of the 30 days. (more on that tomorrow)
Today’s BUZZword is BUZZ.
Blogging and cross posting to some create buzz about Twitter engagement and the importance behind it.
Giving tips to our users weekly about successful campaigns.
450 users.
Twitter hack till going with accounts that have not broken even. (ratio follow to following.)
Broke the 500 active user mark!!
Diving into data with users.
Talking to people about the importance of startups an Twitter engagement.
Concierge (manual) Minimum Viable Product is KEY.
Automating invoices and emails to users.
Validate assumptions with doing EVERYTHING manually. This will make or break any startup.
Quick tip: All the quotes I am reading are from our tweets. Make your tweets motivational quotes to get more retweets.
Tested our camera equipment.
Worked on publishing out a brief SlideShare Hack.
Talking with people in San Francisco via Skype, Twitter, and phone to set up meetings for when we arrive.
Making a list of 100 people I would like to talk with upon arrival.
Meeting new people is key when you are going to a new city like San Francisco. Always give them something in return.
“Generate value for the community or leave” is the mentally behind entrepreneurship in SF.
Running our Twitter hack on @SlingbotStartups
Inbound traffic has picked up over the past few days due content being pushed out.
Added video to Give it 100 (great place to promote your company)
Interview with KillerStartups.
Sent emails to different buckets of users. (non-campaign makes vs. campaign experts.)
Video editing. More tip videos coming out soon.
Newsletter schedule set up.
Always make a voice for your start. Be fun but having people know that you are a successful business, that costs them money to utilize.
We are doing a fun newsletter for our users with tricks and tips.
Generate value or shut up.
Treat your users well.
Admin panel created for success metrics.
Organizing user emails for our weekly newsletter.
Saturday and Sunday are the most effective days to Tweet.
Getting reviews and some press from fans and users!
Don’t be afraid to send me your startup. I have been checking out a lot of startups over the past few weeks.
On Pinterest creating accounts for a growth hack.
Partnerships for potential newsletter rev shares.
Meeting people in SF while still on the east coast.
“If you are not generating value for the community. Shut up.”
First newsletter received awesome feedback.
Created a Doge meme. (Great feedback from users on the meme)
dogecoin Super Bowl (Puppy Bowl) give away.
My co-founder and I have enough dogecoin to give each person that signs up for a new plan 1000.00
Each ‘Sling’ plan sign up is $10 in net revenue. 1000 dogecoincentral is worth roughly $2.00 USD.
Launch to startups and tech community first.
dogecoin give away pushed us over the 600 user mark. Meme marketing needs to be an everyday push for a tech startup.
Always tweet on Saturdays and Sunday.
Superbowl Sunday is perfect for tweeting to fans and users.
Brainstorming Internal virality.
Collecting peoples first names for personalized emails.
Trending on GrowthHackers — A Community for the Growth Obsessed to Connect and Get Inspired (great community of GH’s)
People have been cross posting videos. (meta marketing)
Potential partnerships have come up.
“Under promise, over perform” with all goals, personal and professional.
Mom test.
Send all your new copy to your mom. Great way to validate homepage copy. (and your mom will tell you if she gets it or not…Hopefully)
Glad to hear everyone is still sharing and reading the The Five Dollar Startup
Day 29
Daily Uniques: 300 (yes that is strange it was exactly 300)
Emails to convert to paid. Tested with 2 emails.
Cleaning shop on Twitter accounts. 2 weeks after you do the five dollar startup push with your different Twitter accounts start unfollowing un engaged followers.
Build a strategic plan based on your first months progress.
Anyone who has a checkbook, a brain, and a heart beat, is going to ask you: “What do you need the money for and what do I get?”
Two quick answers:
“We are raising money to prove our business model, and nail down the cost of customer acquisition.”
Standard terms for startups: (not going to go into the financial lingo, email me if you want to talk about yours happy to help)
“You would get a convertible note at a 20% discount with a ____million dollar cap.”
You will need to have a pre-money evaluation done and memorized before talking with ANYONE about raising money. By done and memorized I mean just remember the damn number when someone asks you. Nobody wants to look like a douchebag when talking to someone interested in investing in you.
1 day left!
Quote of the day: ”Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people wont, so you can live the rest of your life like most people can’t.”
Day 30 — Grand Finale!
Daily Uniques: 243
Goals we set for month one:
500 active users.
6,000 conversions
200,000 engagements
4,000 unique visitors
Actual month one success metrics:
700 active users.
13,500 conversions
550,000 engagements
10,000 unique visitors
Celebrated tonight with a goofy Chat Roulette “hack.” We were simply holding a sign that said “Sign up for Slingbot Twitter Social Marketing Platform and I will show you my BOOBS.”After the ChatRoulette user read our ridiculous sign, I flashed them my chest.(man boobs)
It was fun and a great way to wrap up the 30 days.
We are driving to San Francisco on February 20th.
We will be filming the entire trip.
Like the videos? See all the individual “hacks” on Hack & Hustle.
Sign up and support Slingbot Twitter Social Marketing Platform
Email me when Steve McGarry publishes or recommends stories