Date: 2013-11-20 Title: How we got our first thousand visitors Tags: marketing, hackerstreet, rodinhood Slug: how-we-got-our-first-thousand-visitors Gplusid: +SalilPanikkaveettil Summary: After pnr.me was built, the next objective was to publicize it to potential users. We decided to publicize by posting in 4 different websites. We take you through our successes and failures
pnr.me was built and it was working like a breeze, but sadly there were no visitors. What is the use of building an awesome website and no one to benefit from it?. Decision was made that we would publicize pnr.me in the following 4 sites
We had a mix of successes and failures and here is how it all went
Hackernews need no introduction and we assumed that although the audience is highly US centric, there will be sizable amount of indian audience who would be interested in pnr prediction. That assumption turned out to be entirely wrong and we got no upvotes for the original post.
hackerstreet is a community of indian entrepreneurs and technical enthusiasts with heavy influences from hackernews. Pnr prediction is a problem most of them have faced atleast once and we got amazing response both in terms of visits and feedback from Hackerstreet
We were very confused about which sub reddit to use. Should we go for india sub reddit or trains sub reddit?. We finally decided to publicize in trains sub reddit, assuming that since our product had everything to do with trains, it should be the right place to publicize. We were wrong and we got more downvotes than upvotes
We stumbled on a rodinhoods post about possibility of using past data to predict pnr charting status while browsing for pnr prediction. We found the community to be active and were giving generally good feedback and hence we created a showcase post in rodinhoods.
The initial response were good and our traffic data was showing a spike. But we were not prepared for traffic that would come after Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal shared the post in his facebook page. we had a huge jump in traffic which caused an internal service error and we were offline for almost two hours. Unexpected but an amazing marketing win
october 29 and 30th spike is due to hackerstreet and november 6th spike is due to rodinhoods
- Always publicize it to the right audience. Do not rely on a minority audience as the chances that they will be able to upvote or discuss about your work is highly remote
- Do not post on sub reddits with very few audience
- Keep a close watch on errors. First impression could very well be the last one.