How a Small Mistake On Facebook Got My Startup Popular
Journey of a Facebook Page to a thriving StartUp
My friend, Mayukh and I started Science Panorama(now defunc) two years ago(June 2012), and we were extremely enthusiastic about what we were doing. There was very less of what could stop us from going to the top. We started as a science blog, and it was all gold and glitters we could see. Nothing seemed hard. I would write an article, he would write an article, and the few friends, we had in the team would write some more. We’d have had around 4–5 articles a week and the blog would run wonderfully. We were looking to reach as many people as possible.
Over the time, with all the Marketing gimmicks that worked on Social Media, the best one was ‘Free Giveaways’.
One random evening in November 2012, Mayukh called me up and said,
“Bro, Let’s give away free ebooks, I’ve got some great ones in my collection”.
Initially, I was reluctant, for obvious reasons. Didn’t seem like a great idea, but went with it anyways. We got together on a Skype call and decided on the titles we were going to give. The best one, and the one that seemed to have had an amazing readership over the years was ‘Cosmos’ By Carl Sagan. We went with it, we announced it on our Facebook Page. The deal was, “Like our page, and post on our wall in simple line saying, ‘I need the ebook’”. It was something anyone would have done to get a free copy of ‘Cosmos’. And guess what? Overnight, we got hundreds of likes and posts on our wall. And it kept pouring in the following days. Finally, we shared the book on Google Drive and shared it on Facebook so that our fans could download it.
Nothing was wrong until a few hours after posting it. Then the comments of protest against Copyright violation started pouring in. Oh, Boy! Trust me we hadn’t seen that coming. People started commenting things that could potentially jeopardize the reputation of the website over the coming years and we could’ve been sued for giving away the book for free. We immediately killed the link and took the book offline. But people wouldn’t shut up anyways. They continued criticizing. Apart from those who were furious about sharing the book, there were people unhappy about us taking the link down. Because we couldn’t stand up to the promise we had made. We apologized for sharing the book online and then apologized again to those whom we couldn’t give the book to. We actually trended No.1 on Reddit for a whole night under Science Topics for this blunder. And yeah, that got us loads of free exposure too.
At this time, I was just scrolling down our Facebook Page reading comments from people.
One particular comment struck me hard, (It got me furious. We never had intended on Copyright Violation or taking away breads and shit like that. We were just two teenagers trying to give away ebooks so we could increase our reach on Facebook). It read something like,
“There are hundreds of people who make a living out of this, you cannot take it away. If you really want to share knowledge, why don’t you write your own book and then give it away for free? ”
Well, writing a book was far from our reach at that point. We couldn’t even write great articles, to be honest. But then, I something flashed to me-
Me and Mayukh had already worked on a magazine called ‘PDEP’. The creation of the magazine was what had brought me close to Mayukh. It was his idea, to publish a magazine that was free, to share ideas from people and publish articles that everyone could read for free. Well, until then I never knew I wanted to work on something like that, but when I got introduced to Mayukh in early 2012, I just got along with him on making the magazine for his Physics Blog. We had published it in May 2012 and it hadn’t really reached many people. Only a few hundred of them had actually downloaded and fewer had actually read it.
Now, seemed like a good idea to release it again. People were challenging us to write a book and publish it for free, we couldn’t do that. I said to Mayukh, “We have everything ready, Let’s just republish the magazine with a new name and design”. He agreed right away. We announced the same night that we were going to publish a magazine in the next few weeks and that it’d be free for everyone. Suddenly, all the furious comments turned into applause. People started congratulating us and appreciating for taking a bold decision to publish a magazine for free. More ‘likes’ poured in over the next few weeks while we were working on redesigning the magazine. To add icing on the cake, we requested physicists, Abhas Mitra and Maurice de Gosson to write feature stories for the magazine and they agreed. A hearty thanks to them.
All this took place between November 10th and December 26th, 2012 on the day when we released the magazine. We named it WIRE which was an acronym for Where Ideas Reach Everyone. We had left no stone unturned in spreading out a word that we were publishing a science magazine. Our fans had grown from 2.5k to 15k before the night of release, without even spending a penny on marketing.
Well, the whole thing did not work out as planned, but we ended up getting loads of love from people.
We got an amazing exposure. And over the next few months of release after the magazine, it got over 50000 downloads. I had very less expectations on the reach (Actually, We had thought we’d get somewhere around 8–10k downloads based on our Facebook Fans.) but it turned out to be huge. We got more popular over the next few months. We released the second issue of magazine on June 6th, to our 50,000 fans on Facebook.
Why do you think it all worked out pretty well? I never expected to get thousands of likes and even publishing a magazine on the internet that was read by thousands of people was something I had never imagined. But I think, In all the happenings, I learnt some important lessons. I guess, We did a few things right. Here’s what I learnt,
- Never be afraid of trying new things. You never know what it can do for you.
- Be very conscious about grabbing opportunities that might lie under the problems you are facing. Beat the iron when it’s still hot. If we had never released the magazine when people protested, I think we’d have never grown this big and come this far. Beat the iron when it’s still hot.
- Take quick decisions. Opportunities don’t wait for you to finish thinking about it.
- Find a partner/co-founder who compliments you well and someone who trusts in your decisions and vice versa. This is very important. If you’re going to spend most of the time arguing about what to do, good things might have passed by you already.
- Never be hesitant on making mistakes. Make mistakes, Fall down, but be sure to get up quick and fix things and keep moving forward.
It was a great journey all along. I’ve learnt more things over the course. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for reading.
I’m now working on my new project called Speckbit which helps you accelerate your learning on the web.
A large number of people currently, are clueless on how to navigate the web to find relevant and meaningful content for learning new things when they need. We want to connect pupils who need relevant content and direction, to the right content and educators who can help them navigate their learning and achieve success along the journey.
Check it out at https://www.speckbit.com/
Feel free to reach me on Twitter at @justvidyadhar.
