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Posts Tagged ‘Traffic Spikes’

To Show or Not to Show, Part 1: YourVersion (VIDEO)

This is the first in a five-part series of video interviews on how startups can benefit from participating in conferences and competitions at any stage of their growth.

YourVersion CEO Dan Olsen has been bootstrapping his startup for two and a half years but has recently been hitting the startup circuit hard. Since his launch at TechCrunch 50, he and his team have been hard at work competing and promoting their work.

So far his team has been mostly concentrating on being very visible in the San Francisco area, but they’re starting to branch out. At Twiistup in Los Angeles, he took some time to tell us about the costs and the returns of participating in shows and conferences, from user and traffic spikes to press mentions to VC interest.

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5 Trends in 2009’s Startups

If you ever thought startup life would be about champagne toasts and million dollar term sheets then you need to get back in your time machine and set the dial for the nineties. If there’s one thing we learned in the latter half of this decade, it’s discipline. To say that it was a tough year, would be an understatement. But those of us who stayed lean will be back for 2010. While the below concepts weren’t invented this year, they certainly hit their stride in 2009.

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1. Outsourced Labor: Rather than hiring onsite staff, more companies flocked to services like Mechanical Turk and Crowdflower to fulfill simple tasks. Companies listed their jobs and thankfully, a temporary workforce was there to get it done.

2. Cloud Scalability: Rather than paying for a slew of dedicated servers, startups took advantage of elastic workload tools like Amazon Web Services and Heroku. These services kept our site running during huge traffic spikes, but they ensured we weren’t burning cash in the downtime.

3. Web-Based Project Services: Google Apps made huge headway in 2009 as companies migrated from Microsoft to the cloud. Many startups began using real-time cloud collaboration tools to organize their projects, while others looked to customer service sites like Get Satisfaction and Zendesk to manage complaints.

4. Monetization: While consumers will settle for free products, premium services demand a certain level of competence. According to 37signals CEO Jason Fried, “the most intimate transaction between people is money”. In other words, if you put a price on your product and users paid it, you got your feedback. From paid iPhone apps to subscription music services, businesses in 2009 got the feedback they needed to find out if their products made the cut with consumers.

5. The New PR: From soft-spoken Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and his Twitter empire to fast talking Gary Vaynerchuk and his wine podcasts, startup leaders opened the kimono and engaged with stakeholders. Communities don’t get built on autopilot or by a ghostwriting marketing intern. To grow social capital, we learned that we need to put ourselves out there (flaws and all) and treat our audience members like the intelligent beings they are.

Thanks for reading ReadWriteStart in 2009. We look forward to a great 2010 with you and would like to wish you a Happy New Year.

Photo Credit: Windell H. Oskay, Optical Illusion

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Amazon Wins for Most Visited Site on Black Friday

As we reported Thanksgiving Day, web searches and traffic for online retailers during the holidays were significantly down as compared to previous years, according to research from Experian Hitwise.

However, this Black Friday showed a 4 percent increase in site visits versus Thanksgiving Day traffic – a stat that usually falls between those two days. The retail site that got the lion’s share of traffic this year was Amazon.com, which netted 13.55 percent of the traffic seen by the top 500 retail websites. Read on for a few surprising stats that might signal changes in the U.S. economy – and changes in how U.S. consumers will be doing their holiday shopping.

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Interestingly, Apple’s website saw the largest increase – by a huge margin – between Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday. Overnight, their traffic skyrocketed 110 percent. Traditionally, Apple’s online deals for this red-letter day in commerce were modest at best. However, this year, rumors of substantial discounts were leaked online and spread like wildfire.

The lesson: If you want to see a ridiculous upswing in traffic on a major American retail date, maintain relative stinginess and secrecy, then “leak” good tidings of great joy just before the big day.

Other sites that saw a significant traffic increase in this 48-hour period include Staples (47 percent), Dell (40 percent) and Amazon (9 percent).

So, Apple, Staples and Dell take the cake for getting the greatest traffic spikes overnight; how did websites fare on Black Friday overall?

As you can see in the graph below, Amazon and Walmart each performed admirably. What’s more, most sites saw a marginal increase in traffic over last year’s Black Friday traffic – as you’ll recall, the global economy had recently tanked. Do we see this as a sign of tentative optimism about the economy, at least on the part of American consumers?

Finally, who got the most downstream traffic from Black Friday websites? That would be our friends at Walmart, Best Buy, and Target – the latter of which more than doubled its downstream traffic from last year:

Details for Cyber Monday – traditionally the online retailer’s biggest day during the holiday season – will be available shortly.

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To Those About To Demo: How to Deal With Your 15 Minutes of Fame

For the fortunate startups selected to present at any of several large tech conferences this summer and fall, the experience is fraught with excitement, opportunity, and pitfalls in equal measure.

Here’s a round up of words from the wise, including veteran investor Mark Suster on surviving the hype cycle, analyst Sean Power on navigating traffic spikes, entrepreneur Jason Calacanis on how to demo, and our thoughts on the benefits and drawbacks of launching a company or product at a conference.

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The Analyst

First of all, be prepared for a high tide of website visitors. “This is an unprecedented influx of attention,” writes Power in a recent blog post. “It may be the single biggest traffic spike you’ll ever experience. Thousands of visitors will drive by your site, stay for a minute, and leave – never to return. After the bump, you’ll feel a tremendous rush of adrenaline, then deep, soul-sucking disillusionment as your traffic dwindles back to its former levels.”

So, how to capitalize on the opportunity and make sure those visitors return? Gather lots of data, track and measure users’ behavior down to the twitch of a mouse, solicit user feedback, and – most importantly – make sure your servers can handle the traffic.

The Entrepreneur

We also saw a string of blog posts from Calacanis on how to demo, how to run a trade show booth, and other handy conference tips. “After doing 2,500 minutes of demos (40 hours) this year and many more last year… I’ve learned a lot about what makes for a great demo and what makes for a horrible demo,” he wrote in this post. “Since demoing your idea is a key to your success as an entrepreneur, I thought I would share everything I know in a few simple bullet points.”

Simply put, Calacanis advises startups to show the product quickly, get the presentation over with in 5 minutes or less, leave audiences wanting more, talk about accomplishments rather than roadmaps, understand the competition, give short answers, and never-but-never use PowerPoint. In part two of his tutorial, he gets into greater detail, such as handling technical issues and choosing the best method for “the setup,” or the first 30 seconds of a presentation.

See that? That’s a tech startup conference spotlight, and it’s coming right at you. Image courtesy of Twiistup founder Mike Macadaan.

The Journalist

As far as media coverage is concerned, launching during a major tech event can be dicey business. Written last year, these words from former RWW blogger Josh Catone still ring true: “Out of necessity, many of the reviews we wrote of the startups launching at those events were half-assed – we were more concerned with covering as much as possible as we were with writing quality critiques of the startups launching. And that wasn’t really our fault: There were just too many startups coming down the pipeline at once.”

He continued to note that search traffic and Techmeme placement for two specific conferences were on a downward trend, and concluded, “Neither seem like they’ll be any better at acquiring users than any other time you could pick to launch (and might be worse, given the increased levels of startup noise during the events).”

On the not-so-off chance that your startup does not become the buzzed-up darling of this year’s tech conference, you must inevitably resort to getting press the old-fashioned way: by emailing your friendly tech blogger/reporter types.

The Investor

Finally, we come to this insightful post from Suster. “Today I want to talk about Kool Aid. Yours. Don’t drink it. I know you’re thinking that you have your head on straight but I promise you the experience of finding yourself in this maelstrom will leave any first time entrepreneur spinning. Fame and adoration corrupts first timers. And if you’re not careful you might start to believe your own hype.”

Suster continues to spin his own tale from the trenches when he launched his first company. The story is replete with funding from Goldman Sachs, press from Time and the Wall Street Journal, and champagne with Bernard Arnault. The trouble was, Suster had sipped his own Kool-Aid. The company had raised too much money, hired too many people, had too many air-castle-construction discussions, and wasted time while reading their own press. His expert advice makes the post worth reading for any startup about to get major attention from press and investors.

And of course, to all those startups about to demo, we salute you.

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