Traction is the lifeline of every business and especially important for early stage startups. I work for Joola, an early stage startup that developed a data analytics and visualization stack. Joola comes in two flavors, open-source (free) and PaaS (commercial) and we were looking to gain early traction for our commercial product.

The easiest way to gain traction is by throwing money at it. As a self-funded startup this was not a viable option for us. and we were looking for alternatives. We were willing to work hard an put a lot of effort into it and discovered that with some elbow grease we could still get impressive results. This post will cover our attempts and lessons gained.

At first, fail.

We’ve had several attempts in the past of posting our website URL along with a cool headline to Reddit, mostly on /r/technology which were quickly downvoted. We are not sure why they were downvoted but perhaps the subscribers of that subreddit expects a bit more mature products.

We also tried Twitter and Facebook but we could not produce the impact we wanted, we were trying all sorts of tweets and posts but did not get enough traffic.

Then, mildly succeed

We started with Facebook and Twitter. I used my personal Facebook account which consists of mostly our friends and family, so we didn’t really have high expectations there for actual users, but we did expect to see a spike in visitors.

I wrote the following post:

On Twitter we tried the following approaches:

Most of the retweets are from bots, some of the favorites are from actual people.

On Reddit, we posted to /r/startups instead of going to /r/technology as we did in the past

A few valuable comments and 6 upvotes. The important thing about /r/startups on Reddit is that it’s quite a small subreddit, so if your user has enough karma your post will be showing on the subreddit’s frontpage and will also stay there for a while since not a lot of posts are being added every day.

This is the outcome, our Google analytics report for September 29–30:

A total of 205 sessions, most of them are from Reddit, a lot of direct traffic which I cannot attribute to any specific source, from what I’ve read this traffic is labled as ‘Direct’ since some of the mobile clients of Reddit/Twitter are not sending the referer header.

Our Intercom console tells us that 4 users registered during that time period. That’s 1.9% of conversion.

At last, better results

We really wanted to increase our conversion rate, so we thought it would be better to bring more quality visitors than simply driving less relevant visitors to our website. Pushing visitors through our Github project was our hope of increasing our conversion rate.

We’ve added a few links on our Github project to our commerical website and hoped that we will create a funnel of people coming from Reddit -> Github -> Website.

The reason we hoped this attempt will produce better results is because the opensource community is very welcoming to well maintained and well documented projects like ours, so we decided to post on two subreddits: /r/javascript and /r/programming. These are also low-volume subreddits which made it easy for us to reach the frontpage and stay there for a while.

We didn’t really know what to expect because on one hand, we’re directing visitors to our Github page which is cool, but our goal was to get new users for our commercial product, so we expected a low traffic volume but a much better conversion rate. If someone viewed our Github project and found it interesting enough to follow to our website, he’s more likely to sign up and use our product.

This is our Reddit post:

As expected we were on the frontpage on both subreddits for about 8–10 hours.

The results were excellent, this is our Google analytics report for October 1–2:

A total of 473 sessions and even though over 50% marked as direct (remember, we funnled visitors through Github and not directly to our website) I can safely attribute that to Reddit, since that was the only medium we posted at during that time period. I’ve also checked if someone wrote anything about Joola via Google for those dates and found nothing.

Our conversion rates almost tripled, checking Intercom I can see that 25 new users registered in that timeframe, that’s 5.2%.

Also, as a bonus, we got 36 more stars on our Github project.

Conclusions

1. We need to create valuable content in our website, i.e. write relevant blog posts to be able to reproduce the above behavior. We cannot go to reddit day after day posting the same URL with different titles.
2. Don’t look at your website as the only point of entrance into the funnel. Review and identify other potential leads into your funnel and test driving visitors through.
3. Reddit is an awesome traffic driver, you need a user with some decent karma and to know which subreddits to post to. You are more likely to generate more (and better) traffic in the smaller subreddits since you will get more frontpage time.

What’s next?

We are going to tweak our Facebook and Twitter posts by adding some utm tags to them so we can reduce the amount of traffic labled as ‘Direct’ so we can better learn what works and what doesn’t on each medium.

To make this process reproducable, we’re going to write a series of how-to articles showcasing some of our more exciting features in Joola, then we’re going to post those to programming related subreddits (and of course on Twitter and Facebook). I will publish our results and what we’ve learned in our next medium article, stay tuned!