iDoneThis blog

This guest blog post comes from Bassam Tarazi, founder of Colipera.  Colipera uses both individual goal setting and the social pressure that comes from being a part of a group endeavor to help you stay committed to your goals.

We find plenty of reasons to not start; plenty of made up, self-sympathizing reasons to never see a dream or a goal through to the finish. Truth of the matter is, we allow those reasons to seep in like water in a punctured hull because we haven’t committed to the task at hand. We’re not devoted to the all-hands-on-deck mentality that is needed to keep the dream afloat. 

Commitment

You see, commitment is the first and most important part of the journey. Commitment comes before the first action is even taken. That’s where the journey starts. To continue on the mode of transportation analogies, if you were committed to driving cross-country from New York to San Francisco, it doesn’t matter the exact route you take only that you were prepared for the long, sometimes ass-numbing, but wholeheartedly unique voyage ahead of you. While you are no doubt excited for all the new people, towns, experiences and wonders you’ll see, you have to be mentally ready for the hundreds of monotonous and forgotten stretches of road you’ll consume along the way.

Too many people in life get in the car, and figure out 3 miles in that they’re not sure where they’re sleeping that night, a bridge may be out in Utah, and San Francisco is still 2,900 miles away. So of course, quitting seems like a much better option.

The Journey Within the Journey

How do you manage the 3,000 mile journey mentally? Day by day. Exit by exit. Mile by mile. Inch by inch. Our brains don’t like being less than 50% done with something. We don’t want to only get excited for the inevitable downhill, no-turning-back psyche of passing Chicago. We need to have smaller, mini-goals because we take great joy in hitting milestones. “Hellllooooo Ohio!” and, “Nebraska, you’re big, but I will beat you yet!” We play the “How many miles can I drive today before I stop for gas/food/sleep?” game. Accomplishing goals, no matter how small, feels great.

This psychology works in fundraising, as well. Why do most charities only start broadcasting their current funding state to the public when they are near 50%? Well because it shows people that the cause is worth fighting for and that the goal is within reach. Fundraising also uses another tactic to help raise money at that point: peer pressure. If other people have helped it come this far, it must be a worthy trip. It’s part social proofing, and part the wisdom of crowds. If no one else has committed to this thing, why the hell should I? And conversely, if so many people have committed to this, I want to be a part of it too. I want to help get it over the edge. I want to be part of something.

Day by day. Inch by inch. Goal by goal. 

It’s easy to get support for what you’re doing when you’ve shown some success; and to be successful, you first have to start, unceremoniously. In the beginning it’s mostly your commitment - your blood, sweat and passionate tears that gets you to some percentage of completion. Before you can hit the highway, the gas tank needs to be full, that long overdue oil change needs to be taken care of, those brakes need to be retooled, and snacks should be on board.  That commitment needs to be made first.

In the beginning, it’s not fundraising, it’s friendraising.  Breaking down your goal into manageable bites allows people to support you and gives you a chance to be part of someone else’s dream; to be part of something outside of yourself.  Take the collective inspiration that groups provide and merge that with the personal accountability that each of us need to succeed at any task and you have a recipe for a journey worth traveling.

Bassam built Colipera as a system for collective inspiration and personal accountability.  You can check it out at Colipera.com.

We have a broad-based, loosely constrained web application.  Our users engage with the site in a variety of different ways for a number of reasons.  That makes it difficult to take a bunch of usage information and turn it into actionable data about how to position our product.

In searching for data to form the basis for a concise statement on our site’s value proposition, we ended up in an unexpected place.  We had built an invite system which was super simplistic.  A user could type in an email address and include an optional message.  We would email that person with an invitation to sign up to use iDoneThis (no special referral URL, just a link to http://iDoneThis.com).  

It turns out that when a user invited her friend to use iDoneThis, she used the optional message, not merely to say hello, but as an opportunity to pitch her friend on using iDoneThis.  Our invite system ended up containing concise statements of how users use iDoneThis, how it works for that use case, and the value they derive from it — and gives us the language to express all of that.

Turning those words into a word cloud gives macro-level view on the key concepts used by the crowd to pitch iDoneThis.  Day, done, email, and track are the most commonly used words.  After that, simple, send, see, work and every stand out.  Finally, journal, calendar, sends, diary, and free have a good number of mentions.

• “Every” and “day” describe the temporal context of the “done” and the “email.”
• “Email” is the medium within which we work — everyone knows how to use it, so it’s “simple.” We “send” a daily email, which describes the difference between push versus pull.
• What got “done” is what’s being “track[ed]” — it’s the question for which we’re prompting a response.
• “Track[ing]” daily “done[s]” creates an object of value, a “journal”, “diary”, or “calendar” which could be used personally or for “work” that you can look back on and “see” your progress.

The prominence of words such as “really”, “like” and “love” to express the concepts above suggests that, whether for personal or professional use, iDoneThis is valuable because it’s a friendlier way to do status updates because a nagging boss isn’t involved.

Ultimately, the taglines to use are the ones that convert the best.  Implementing a dead simple invite system is one of the easiest ways to seed that iterative process.  Let your own customers pitch on your behalf, and see what they say.

The lean startup movement disdains the big press launch, and rightfully so. However, the polemical nature of the argument gives off the impression that press should never be sought.  Quite the contrary, press should be sought ceaselessly.  That being said, it’s important to understand the magnitude of traffic that you can expect from press and of what kind.

We’ve been fortunate to have received writeups from three of the biggest drivers of traffic for a young startup: Lifehacker, Netted, and Business Insider.  

Lifehacker

With the tiny investment of time that it took to draft two cold emails, we got a huge payoff in getting written up by Lifehacker.  For most new startups, TechCrunch is a distant and unattainable goal, but Lifehacker will write about your weekend project if it’s got a compelling productivity hook.  To boot, Lifehacker will drive traffic on the same order of magnitude as TechCrunch with users who may actually stick around.

Lifehacker visibility attracted productivity nuts like Ernesto Ramirez to our site, who brought a strong point of view to our broad-based product.  As a Quantified Self guy, within the daily email-reminder scheme, Ernesto saw the opportunity to track “everything else” — the stuff that you can’t track with a device.  He helped us understand how to build for QS folk and evangelized our product throughout the community.

The one-day high traffic spike from Lifehacker was just short of 4,000 visits, but over the course of a month, that same content was syndicated out to Lifehacker Japan, Lifehacker Australia, Lifehacker Canada, and Lifehacker UK.  All told, we got over 11,000 visits and around 4,000 signups from investing one hour to draft two emails.  

Netted

Getting written up by Netted was a pleasant surprise.  We hadn’t pitched them — they had found us through Lifehacker, tried the site for one month, and liked it, so they wrote about us.  Zach at Netted had kind words for us.  He wrote, “Honestly, I spend my days looking at hundreds and hundreds of sites… yours is well made, simple, effective and generally awesome. Well done.”  

Netted drove a one-day high just exceeding that of Lifehacker — a tad over 4,000 visits — but because Netted works as a daily email, it netted very little traffic in the days that followed (on the order of hundreds of visits).  

Nevertheless, the Netted cohort is the strongest of the three in terms of those users who have stuck around and continued to use the product.  It’s a testament to the Netted brand and the character of its user base that it drove thousands of signups to a “digital journal” product who didn’t just sign up to take a peek at the product.  Netted referrals had close to the highest ratio of signups to first-time use, and those users continued to use the product week over week.

Business Insider

It’s useful to follow tech journalists because they’ll occasionally tweet asking for help with stories they’re writing.  In late June, Alyson Shontell at Business Insider tweeted that she was “compiling a hot Silicon Valley startup list” and she sought “help finding hidden gems.”  I found her email and composed her a note with a short blurb about iDoneThis as a hidden gem.   

I heard nothing from her for a month, and then at the end of July, she wrote back saying that we’d made the list.  A few days later, the list was up and the bump hit a one-day high of nearly 5,000 visits.  

The writeup was fantastic for us in terms of traffic and signups, but the Business Insider bump was perhaps most notable in terms of the queries from VCs, angels, salespeople, and job seekers that it sent our way.  It makes sense — it’s an industry blog about startups, not a subject-matter site like Lifehacker.  Nonetheless, because the startup world is filled with high achievers and productivity seekers, we also retained a number of committed users from the writeup.

What’s your take on press?

Have you experienced press bumps?  How do you turn it into recurring, sustainable traffic?  Let us know in the comments!