(as I spent the bulk of my 20s discovering) This is not your typical rails app that you can bang out in a weekend.

Investor meetings had an interesting pattern.Back in 2006 the cloud storage market was insane.– 20% from shared folders, other viral features – 35% of daily signups from referral program September 2008: 100,000 registered users.

Trailing 30 days (Apr 2010) :: users sent Help from Sean Ellis: Surveys, split tests,.Permanently increased signups by 60% (!!) Give users better tools to spread the love.Similar things existed, but people weren’t.They didn’t have to carry a USB drive, email Mostly ignored (or woefully mishandled):.Making an elegant, simple product that “just Fortunately, we spent almost all our effort on.Lots of pressure (or guilt) to do things the.Reached 1mm users 7 months after launch.Affiliate program, display ads, etc sucked too.– Probably by other venture-backed startups Picked out keywords, made landing pagesĪrriving via paid search, replace with free.Hired experienced SEM & affiliate marketing.Hire, um, a PR firm, or a VP of Marketing, or Hire, um, a PR firm, or a VP of Marketing, or.Public launch (Sep 2008): Time to get real Know where your target audience hangs out.Put something in users hands (doesn’t have.Not launching  painful, but not learning .Private beta launch video  12,000 diggs īeta waiting list jumps from 5,000 to 75,000 in Simple landing page: capture interest/email (sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident)ģ min screencast on Hacker News (Apr 07): Mostly done by engineers w/ some guidance.Hostile environment: lots of competitors,.

Powerpoint in paper dropbox