100,000 Users And So Can You (A history of Carbonmade)

http://spencerfry.com/2009/10/21/100000-users-and-so-can-you

by maxstoller • 17 years ago

68 13 17 years ago

mrshoe• 17 years ago

> Creative people are likely to be friends with other creative people who turn out to need portfolios themselves, and this creates a rapidly expanding circle... our users derive a direct benefit from showing off their portfolio, which in turn is free marketing for our service.

If you're a startup looking to get noticed online, I'd suggest taking this to heart. Marketing is much easier if your users have a strong incentive to market your product for you.

> We don’t subscribe to the "Release Early, Release Often" philosophy. Admittedly, we’re perfectionists to a fault, but when you’ve got 158,000 pleased users, you can’t simply disrupt things with a series of bells-and-whistles updates just to follow a silly motto.

I don't think that philosophy is meant to apply to applications with hundreds of thousands of users. It's meant for the early product development phase when you have very few users. You can, however, do bucket testing, like Google and other larger players, and release updates to a tiny portion of your users to see how they react.

spencerfry3• 17 years ago

"I don't think that philosophy is meant to apply to applications with hundreds of thousands of users. It's meant for the early product development phase when you have very few users. You can, however, do bucket testing, like Google and other larger players, and release updates to a tiny portion of your users to see how they react."

Totally agree with you there. That's actually something I really want to start doing after we release our new version. We've never done any type of A/B testing and it just makes sense.

On a similar note, I was talking with my friend Eric Friedman last night about this very topic. He suggested creating small buttons that people could click on, but weren't actually active and gave a "Coming Soon" message and then tracking the frequency in how often they were clicked. You could release these little buttons to 2-5% of your users and then see how they performed. And then build features around the buttons that were clicked more frequently.

jasonlbaptiste• 17 years ago

This is a GREAT read. I love stories that get into the nitty gritty details. Sort of like Founders at Work. 100k users don't come out of nowhere. There's a lot that causes that and lots of tinkering. Figuring it out is great.

spencerfry3• 17 years ago

Someone asked why we haven't updated our homepage in 3 years (and the significance of that) and if I could speak to that. The comment got deleted before I could respond, so I'll just create a new thread.

It's partially covered in the article. The first year, we were still do consulting work, so we barely spent any time on Carbonmade. And then in the second year, we were working on a second product that never saw the light of day. And now in the third year, we're focused on Carbonmade exclusively and nearly ready to release the new version.

Here's what I learned from running a company for three years without any update to the product: Excellent customer service could be the most significant thing you can do. (Granted, you need a pretty solid product.) During the first year we were really bad with emails and responding to our customers around the Net. We practically ignored everyone and everything. We just didn't have the time. Then in year two, I began to take customer support very seriously. I'd respond to peoples emails within minutes (when I could) and within hours 90% of the time. You literally can take a look at our graphs and see a HUGE uptick in signups/paid sign ups/customer retention within a month of responding to emails.

I also went back through at least 6 months of old emails that we had simply archived away and responded to everyone explaining how sorry we were for not giving them good support and answering their questions. I wrote everyone individually and got a lot of "it's no problem, I'm happy that you're spending the time to do so now." It really impacted our brand a lot and we saw a lot of people begin to respond with emails like: "Wow, you guys responded faster than I've ever been responded to before. You're so great. Thanks so much for your service. I'm telling all my friends."

Also, around this time I chose to treat all customers equally no matter if they were paying or if they weren't. I figured -- and you'd think this was obvious -- that spending a few extra minutes to treat free customers well will make them more likely to upgrade and actually costs less (in time and money) than going out and finding new customers. This turned out to be very successful. I can point to hundreds of emails from free customers that upgraded after hearing back from a "real person who was kind and helpful".

Good customer service is king and really turned our product around.

(Thanks for reading my rant.)

jbyers• 17 years ago

"Excellent customer service could be the most significant thing you can do."

Amen. At Wikispaces we absolutely obsessed over fast, human responses to support questions early on -- and still do. People are regularly shocked to get a response at all, let alone from a person, let alone in the span of a few minutes. That email can be the difference between getting frustrated and leaving for good vs. being a long term site user.

JoeAltmaier• 17 years ago

Its actually a relative minimum of effort to respond very quickly - drastically reduces the number of outstanding issues to track. Ignoring tracking, it takes the same total effort to answer NOW as a week from now. Now I wish my garage mechanic/doctor would operate this way.

fjabre2• 17 years ago

Thanks for this piece Spencer. Very inspiring indeed.

I really like the "Give the demo a try" feature on the landing page. Could you give any insight into whether this see-for-yourself feature really aided in getting signups..?

I was thinking about doing something similar for my site, which is why I'm asking...

Thanks and best of luck on your continued growth.

iamcarbon• 17 years ago

@fjabre. We initially introduced the demo to help cut back on people signing up to see how the product worked with no intention of using it. Oddly enough, it actually reduced our total number of signups. But the users that make it through and signup are much more likely to be long term active users.

fjabre2• 17 years ago

Ha. Didn't think of it from that angle.. but that makes total sense.. Thanks!

raghus• 17 years ago

Just saw this from 37s: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1976-launch-haystack-a-better...

asmosoinio• 17 years ago

Font looks very odd on my Vista machine, but I am a happy user of Readability: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

mistermann• 17 years ago

The white on black overlaying everything just grates on me for some reason. Otherwise very nice.

100,000 Users And So Can You (A history of Carbonmade)

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