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David Rusenko

The importance of launching early and staying alive

2/26/2008

 

I first started working on Weebly in February 2006. I worked for about a year on it with Dan and, later, Chris' help, and we launched a (very) early version of Weebly in mid-November 2006. We were TechCrunch'ed a few days later, and accepted into Y Combinator the same day. (On the morning of our YC interview, we woke up to discover we were on TechCrunch).

Weebly has been growing ever since then, gone through two complete visual redesigns, added numerous features, and doesn't even resemble the product we launched with at all.

Here's two of our graphs from May 8th 2007 -- five months after we moved out to San Francisco and had been working on the product full-time:

The first is a graph of our new signups per day, and the second is a graph of our total user count per day. I've annotated the top graph with what events caused the major spikes.

There's actually two very interesting things to note about the top graph: First, we had already closed our angel round at this point -- looking back, our investors placed a huge amount of confidence in us.

Second, the new users per day looks like it might actually be declining a little bit.

At this point, I'd been working on Weebly for about a year and a half, and we'd been launched for over six months. Judging by the graphs, you might think things weren't looking spectacular. This is the type of situation when people give up.

I've seen it quite a bit among startups -- they spend more time developing the product than they do running it after they launch it. Several have followed the same pattern: build, build, build, launch, quit.

But you've got to keep with it to gain momentum. It doesn't usually just build overnight, it takes time. Keep building your product, and eventually you gain momentum and a critical mass of people who know about you and tell others about you.

Now, here are the graphs from a couple weeks ago:

These graphs look a hell of a lot better. There's 2 things I'd like to point out:

- First, the "build it and they will come" mentality is a fallacy. You need to build something great and have distribution in order to succeed. And distribution is hard to get.

There are many ways to get distribution. One of those is through press. If you have a great product, the more people that find out about you, the more people will know about you. And they'll tell their friends, who'll tell their friends, etc.

Another subtle press benefit: you're getting links from a bunch of very highly-regarded sites, and this helps out your rankings in search engines quite a bit, which builds more traffic.

There are plenty of other good ways to get traffic too, such as engineering for viral growth, but press can have huge benefits for the right product.

- Second, in order to get people to use your product, you have to stay alive. This sounds obvious, but a ton of people spend 6 months building a product, launch it, and give up within 3 weeks.

Plain and simple, it's going to take time for people to start using your product -- there are exceptions, but it's generally not the norm. So you need to expect that, and be willing to give it time. If you give up within a month or two, your product definitely won't be successful.

Once you launch, people start to know about you. If you launch early, you can start earlier on the process of acquiring users. Don't launch with a crappy product -- launch as soon as what you have is better than what is out there. But don't wait for a perfect product -- launch as early as you can, get user feedback, and keep improving the product.

Paul Stamatiou link
2/25/2008 05:35:11 pm

Great read as usual David.

Issyk-Kul Karakol link
2/25/2008 07:23:13 pm

That's the good reading and graphs for new online apps creators - start early with minumum working basis.

Ross Hill link
2/25/2008 08:56:38 pm

Insightful charts, thanks for posting!

Robert
2/25/2008 09:32:09 pm

Really interesting read. I'm currently in a startup with exactly the same characteristics: also about 20k users after a year, two TC posts, etc. It's tough sometimes to keep motivated. These kinds of articles help a lot, as well as being a bit naive and staying true to your thirst thought when you started the company.

And you're totally freaking right about the distribution part. That's something most people overlook but also something you really want to think about early on.

Raffy Banks link
2/25/2008 11:50:53 pm

I completely agree with your points and can attest to:

"...in order to get people to use your product, you have to stay alive. This sounds obvious, but a ton of people spend 6 months building a product, launch it, and give up within 3 weeks."

Years ago I gave up on a project that I was quite passionate about simply because I was getting so few signups. Even though I was getting tons of traffic I assumed people had no interest in what I was offering so I prematurely abandoned the project instead of figuring out what I was doing wrong.

You are right, persistence is key.

Thanks David

Steven Romej link
2/26/2008 02:37:59 am

These posts have been helpful and inspiring, thanks.

Luke Seeley link
2/26/2008 03:00:42 am

Haha, it looks like that second Techcrunch spike actually cuts through the top of the graph.

I'm glad you stuck with it, you guys make a superb product.

Shafqat link
2/26/2008 07:11:04 am

Great post! We're having these discussions daily at NewsCred. Its a fine balance between launching too early (i.e. crappy product) and launching early enough to get good, iterative feedback. But you hit the nail on the head - distribution is key. Getting good press and TC coverage can make or break a startup, so its worth focusing on distribution almost as much as the product itself.

Congratulations on your well-deserved success!

Mark Hinkle link
2/26/2008 08:00:21 am

Great post, I witnessed the same phenomenon with the "Slashdot effect". We make an open source monitoring solution that was Slashdott'd twice in 30 days. Getting the attention is great but having a great product/service when all that traffic arrives is paramount. Those two posts generated tons of traffic and we capitalized on organic search and links for many months then on.

Gustaf Alstromer
2/26/2008 02:27:25 pm

This is a great post David!

Guglielmo link
2/26/2008 07:19:21 pm

I agree.
Launching early & working hard to stay alive => attracting an audience.
Of course, the next step after that is to keep growing fast enough to become a big player, before competitors get your idea and copy it.
I think many "send your own video" sites started at about the same time, but only one of them hit the big time, i.e. YouTube. How?

shawn link
3/10/2008 02:22:33 am

I've been spreading the weebly word ever since I started my music blog. I wish you well with this project. After all, I've spent waaaay too much time with this blog for you to just give up, phhhh.

Matt link
3/21/2008 03:43:12 am

Some good points there David. I'd be interested to hear how Techcrunch heard about Weebly before featuring you online? Did you approach them? How did they discover your project?

free press release link
3/21/2008 08:15:32 pm

Hi Matt,

Only Mike Arringtons knows what will be featured in his blog. Press is definitely a great way to announce your product to the world. If you are not budget constrained use services like prnewswire.com or prweb.com . It costs $300 or less to distribute a search engine optimised press release. If you are just starting out, you can use many free press release sites. Here you can get a list of 50 free press release sites. Soon we are planning to post a detailed report with page rank, alexa traffic rank etc. Services like PR.com, 24-7pressrelease, theopenpress.com are good. Some are free. Most of them costs less than $30.

free press release link
3/21/2008 08:17:37 pm

Sorry I forgot to post the link. Here is the <a href='http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/paid-service-pressreleasepoint-com-posting-50-free-press-release-websites#sitelist'>list of 50 free press release distribution sites</a>

Our site is http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/

Eugene Ware link
8/12/2008 11:28:18 pm

Do you think that you'll overtake squidoo soon?

Wayne
8/31/2008 03:58:50 am

Awesome article. We're also in a similar situation as you. Our web 2.0 site has a small but growing user base.

Explore, Learn, Review
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9/23/2008 06:13:09 pm

Hi, David
Where I see vacations in Weebly?
Regards, Dsasser

Angela Via Baila Baila link
10/2/2008 07:14:05 pm

Hi, David
I'd be interested to hear how Techcrunch heard about Weebly before featuring you online?
Regards, Via Angela

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10/28/2008 06:47:29 pm

If you are just starting out, you can use many free press release sites. Here you can get a list of 50 free press release sites
Regards, Susan
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10/29/2008 10:25:16 pm

Hi,
If you are not budget constrained use pr services
Regards, Susan

Drug Rehab Cost link
12/29/2008 11:43:40 am

That chuck norris thumbs up made me comment. That has to be the funniest thing I've ever seen!

press release writing link
1/2/2009 06:57:24 pm

Wow, I never knew that The importance of launching early and staying alive. That’s pretty interesting...

angus link
1/8/2009 03:12:31 am

Insightful charts, thanks for posting.

ZK@Web Marketing Blog link
5/3/2009 02:51:51 am

Weebly is heading towards an era, where it would be able to challenge the blogging giants like blogger and wordpress. Even drupal is going to have a tought competition with the weebly, whatever the weebly is creating waves.

coupon link
5/7/2009 05:13:40 am

I completely agree with your points. After buiding great product, you need to broadcast the product. Then you have to stay alive so people can continue to use your product, give you feedback, then you improve the product.

club penguin link
5/30/2009 05:33:07 pm

I've been spreading the weebly word ever since I started my music blog. I wish you well with this project. After all, I've spent way too much time with this blog for you to just give up.

Kids Games link
9/1/2009 07:35:36 am

Weebly is an excellent tool for people first starting web design on the internet. Great to read something from the voice behind Weebly.


Comments are closed.
    Picture
    David co-founded Weebly, an incredibly easy to use tool that helps millions of people create a professional web site, blog or online store.

    He was named to Forbes'  30 under 30 list, is a part-time DJ and has traveled to over 20 countries.

    Investments include Cue, Parse, Exec, Churchkey, Streak, Incident Technologies, Adioso and Zenefits.

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