Startups

Passing 10,000 users felt awesome and we did it with three dead simple techniques that anyone can execute.

1.  Custom narratives for influential communities.  I wrote in April how we made it to 5,000 users by constructing custom narratives for Hacker News, Reddit, and Lifehacker.  We described iDoneThis to a community as both (a) a solution to the problems specific to that community with (b) an emotional hook that the community could relate to while (c) giving signals that reflect that we’re members of the community.

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In choosing to do our startup in the San Francisco Bay Area, near the heart of the Valley — the world center for technology and innovation — and joining an incubator run by Xooglers, we didn’t expect our company’s most powerful and transformative lesson over the past 4 months to be that in the realm of the visceral, intangible, and emotional.  What we learned first and foremost was the importance of vision and its resonance as an organizing principle.

A company is a group of people making a series of decisions.  But what continues to bind individuals together in a common enterprise?  And how do individuals with wildly variant opinions and selves make shared decisions?  The lesson we learned is that vision, not profit motive or friendship, provides the emotional glue to stick together and the axioms upon which concrete decisions — resolving data and feedback — are made.

iDoneThis started out as a side project done over a weekend by Rodrigo and me with one simple mechanic in mind — a daily prompt to record what you did that day.  In years prior, Rodrigo had kept a calendar to track daily progress and we thought to make that process easy for everyone.  People liked it.

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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.

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I’m often asked how iDoneThis has been featured so often in the press.  Business Insider picked as one of 20 startups to watch, Bob Scoble tweeted about us, and Lifehacker, Netted, The Next Web, and The New York Observer have all written about our modest three-man band.

For us, press has come from making a case to be heard through relationships with the relevant people.  Knowing people results from schmoozing.

I’ve never been a good schmoozer.  My mom told me to be a professor like my dad, because, “No one likes you.”  I’m usually standing in the corner talking with a friend at parties, if I’m at a party at all.  I get worn out from being around people and need my alone time to recharge.

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