How did Aggregate Intellect Website Traffic Grow by 100% in the Past Month?
For the past 30 days, I’ve been waking up every day, and the first thing I would do is pulling up Google Analytics on my phone to see our active user growth. Every day, a few more percents until today we hit 100% more monthly users than previous 30-day period!
This might come as a bit of surprise for those of you who have been following my (mostly whining) posts about (mostly difficult things about) working in a startup like aggregate intellect, aka going from zero to one. This is a bit of surprise to ourselves too because given the drastic changes we went through this summer (changes in team, personal issues for several team members, etc).
But how did all this happen? Was it an accident?
Hint: No!
I attribute this steady growth to a few things that we started doing differently about 2 months ago:
- Focus: The first thing that we did after we weathered the stormy summer we had was to go back to the drawing board and think about the most important things we needed for our product to be successful. Maryam (our COO) and I spend some time discussing the details and decided to suspend or repurpose all of our activities that are not focused around our product.
- Metric: We have always tried to be metric driven, but perhaps haven’t been focusing on the right ones. Recently, based on a series of learnings, we finally decided on Retention as the most important thing to focus on. This was particularly good, because it right away took away several items on our backlog that were about other parts of the pipeline. We decided to seal all the leaks first, and then bring in more traffic. One of the most important outcomes of this decision was added urgency for removing bugs and improving user experience, things that we cared about, but weren’t originally a top priority.
- All-hands Meeting: Next step was to ensure everyone (we’re around 10 people now) is on the same page about the long term vision of our product and understand how their sprint tickets leads into milestones, and finally to the big picture. This was a short and sweet meeting where we presented some idea, discussed the importance of retention metric as the north star, and discussed how each product feature contributes to the bigger mission of our platform.
- Rigor and Process in Dev: Around the same time, about 2 months ago, I sat down with our lead engineer, Hamid, and we discussed how our development process can be more efficient and less error prone. We ended deciding on implementing a Scrum process (we used to do a fairly loose Kanban before that). The team is still adapting to this change, but the results are already evident: fewer errors, better prioritization, more clarity around objectives
- Rigor and Process in Growth: Encouraged by the success of having more rigor in dev, Maryam and I discussed implementing more experimental mindset and processes in our growth strategy. So, we dusted off our good old validation board and implemented a Scrum-inspired-marketing sprint system. Every 2 weeks, we discuss the experiments we want to run, our assumptions and objectives, and then huddle to look at the results and design the next experiments. More on this later since we just started it.
- Trusting the Team: I, like most managers with technical background, have the tendency to micro-manage a bit. So, I had to take a step back and trust the team to make good decisions. Ammar (our community manager), as a result, has been running with some interesting community engagement experiments, and we’re uncovering some interesting ideas.
- Content: Although we’re not quite a content platform, but the tool that we’re building can be used to curate knowledge very easily. So, we’ve been using it to produce a large amount of very high quality content (Recipes) that we’ve been publishing and people have been really loving it. We are also collaborating with our community members (join here)with much more of this, so stay tuned.
I am excited about where we are, and where we are going. I think we have navigated one of the most challenging times of our startup so far, and came out stronger as shown by the number above: 100% growth in monthly active users, 100% in weekly, and 240% in daily!
For those less familiar with our product, we’re building an Intelligent Research & Development Operating System; a platform for managing knowledge throughout the life-cycle of an R&D project, starting from AI applications. The platform aims to reduce the time-to-market for experimental software development from months to days by reducing the risk of this kind of project using a combination of human- and machine- intelligence. Learn more at https://ai.science
Aggregate Intellect
Aggregate Intellect is a Global Marketplace where ML Developers Connect, Collaborate, and Build. Connect with peers & experts at https://ai.science or Join our Slack Community.
- Check out the user generated Recipes that provide step by step, and bite sized guides on how to do various tasks
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- Connect with peers & experts through the ML Discussion Groups or Expert Office Hours
