"This feels a little like meaningless link bait till then". Spot on.
When I saw the title of the article I assumed that they already got the 10,000 sign ups and were explaining how did they manage to do it.
As I was reading through their list I was getting more and more skeptical. Some of their points make sense, others, simply don't ring true.
I then checked their Twitter account and saw that they had (at the time of writing) 93 followers. Really? 93? Not that I think that Twitter followers is the most useful metric as a measure of interest in a web-app (or that Twitter is really useful as a marketing tool for that matter) but for people that claim to be riding the waves of the viral marketing and that seem to put a lot of value and effort into increasing their Twitter and FB numbers, 93 followers sure looks a little low.
I had to come back to the comments in HN and to read carefully the title of the submission again to realize that they don't actually claim to have the 10,000 followers yet. Only that they want to reach that number. And they hope that the steps outlined in the article will help them to get there.
This misunderstanding may well be because English is not my first language, but even so, it still smells like link bait to me. I'm pretty sure that almost everyone around here will have his own opinion on how to get 10,000 sign ups. Until that opinion has been proven to work in real life, it's still a hunch, not all that useful.
Agreed. The marketing (blog text) was impressive. But you lost about 90% credibility by having essentially 0 followers on twitter. For a site of such broad appeal, you should be way higher than that.
It's doesn't match the air of authority you project on social media tactics.
Making it to difficult to join, will stop to success of this. There is a border interested customers won't cross and making them to beg hard probably is that border.
It's not that we want to make it hard to join the beta, it's that we want to reward the people who promote us to others. Everyone who gives us their e-mail address gets in early. Those who help us out get in earlier.
I promise to do a post-mortem, success or failure.
I'm a huge, huge fan of #3 (treating content as something more than blog posts). Calling something a blog post is a lot like calling something a newspaper article: it gives you an instantaneous framing for the value of it. That framing is not the one you desire in most cases.
You'd be freaking amazed how much the presentation of something influences how much people trust it, how long it's shelf life lasts, and whether it spreads. This includes transparently superficial bits like whether it has a decent logo or illustration accompanying it or whether you date the content. (Don't date evergreen content! It only compromises perceived value to know that your article about elementary school arithmetic was first published in 1993. Addition hasn't freaking changed!)
I'm actually going to disagree with the "don't date evergreen content", at least for us. Because we're writing about financial information, we're going to datestamp revisions because we want someone who comes to us via Google/Bing/DDG to know that we're on top of changes to the law/investment environment/etc.
The only reason we haven't yet is because I haven't figured out a way to have it appended automagically to Pages in WordPress.
Edit your theme's page.php to include something similar to:
Last modified <?php the_modified_time('F d, y') ?>
So your understanding of evergreen content and my understanding are a little different. I agree, if I covered topics where my advice would get stale, I would prefer to let people know that I have updated the advice recently so that it was not stale. I just disagree that writing pieces which are capable of getting stale is a good use of my time, since I am time- and resource-constrained.
Writing anything which could go stale is time debt for the future, since I will have to rewrite later, which is extra work for rather little marginal benefit. Worse, it means I'll have to periodically review and rethink everything I've ever published to see whether it needs updating, which is extra work with no benefit that gets progressively more expensive over time as I grow my little content forest.
I think there are virtually infinite topics in investing which are truly evergreen, where you could let the article sit for a hundred years and never need to touch it again. "What is a preferred stock?" is one. "Should I invest in mutual funds managed by a human being?" is another, though that is more controversial. (cough No. cough)
The US was unusually stable, as countries in history go, over the previous 100 years. Even so, the nature of the stock market, the kinds of things traded in it, and the regulations pertaining to them, have changed fairly significantly since 1910. I believe a preferred share is still more or less the same thing now that it was then, but that they're used for fairly different things.
In any case, you should leave the judgment of whether your writing is still worth reading when it's ten, thirty, or a hundred years old to your readers, rather than trying to make the judgment yourself.
Interesting and undeniably clever. However given you're looking for so many people you sure make it sound like you're doing me a favour whereas I see it as doing you a favour.
Given I know nothing about your product, or how good it is, why on earth would I want to shout about it from the rooftops before I've even used it for any length of time? You're effectively asking me to lend my trust network to you to promote your product, without letting me use it first.
It seems to me you're more likely to get the techcrunch-refreshing, ohh-shiny, sign-up-to-anything crowd than the kind of people that might be really interested in your product.
If you sign up for the Preview and never once tweet, Like, link to us, or whatever - if you're just like the 90% of normal users who come our way - you still get early access to Blueleaf. The vast, vast majority of our sign ups look like this, and that's totally OK. But we can't expect random people to come to our site if they don't read about it somewhere. This is what we're doing to try to make it easier for people to find us.
I understand, but that post was written as though you were running an exclusive nightclub, not a startup. Surely if the product really is as good as what came across to me as arrogance suggests, the buzz will happen organically, no?
I signed up and got an email back that basically said "thanks for signing up, now dance monkey".
I'm the guy whose money you want and the way your blog and the sign up was worded, I feel like I'm dealing with a company who has forgotten this. Usually a company will forget AFTER they are successful, not before.
I'm not sure if I hope this works or not. I will keep tabs on it to see just how far a beta system can be pushed. I'm glad this test is on your dime and not mine! :)
The email is not rude, but its not the traditional "we are so thankful you've signed up, here's what you asked for" either.
I figured out what bugs me about this approach. I took the time to punch my email in and instead of getting my reward, I am told of a bunch of other things I can do to get involved with BlueLeaf. Why would I? I don't know how good your reward is and I have no prospect of sampling it.
I'm as simple as a lab mouse hitting the button for a pellet. I received no pellet and am now uninterested as a result.
I am however interested in how other people react. I acknowledge that I'm a crotchety old man at 28. :)
They seem to think they're more interesting than they are. That approach might work for getting access to a beta for the next Valve game, or a preview of the PlayStation 4 or whatever. But for this site? Bah. I've lost interest already.
Just to be clear, you expected to be able to use a beta system right away after providing your email, and not having access to that made you feel unsatisfied/uninterested? The signup button does say "request an invite", is that not enough?
We use Wufoo for our lead capture; we could A/B test by creating two different forms, but we haven't. These e-mails don't track clicks, but all our other e-mails do.
I'll take the single incremental click/follow/Like any day; it's pretty clear that there's some return there, even if it's low. Also, it appears that those who Like on Facebook, in particular, are normals and not tech enthusiasts, which warms my heart.
#1 and #2 sound like dickhead moves to me. I don't think of any webapp I've ever wanted a part of badly enough to "beg for an invite", nor do I think I'd ever want to trust my financial information to a company that has so much raw contempt for their users that they would even consider making potential users "beg publicly" for an invite.
You think it is a good idea to brag about belittling users?
Oh please, please, let me in, let me use your awesome product!
It doesn't seem like the guy on twitter was pleading. You might have some good ideas about marketing, so please, go ahead with them, but get over your self. You are not that great and you're product is not that great.
Have some respect for the potential consumers who can make or break you.
* The site isn't https by default
* Going to https://www.blueleaf.com (or non-www) shows an untrusted warning in Firefox
made me weary of signing up. It looks like a beautiful service, but any website handling real money or financial information should be secure by default.
HTTPS for the marketing site increases page load times; there's no real reason to force people just browsing by to a secured server. The app itself, of course, is secure; it's just on a different subdomain: https://secure.blueleaf.com/signin
My todo for today (assuming my cold doesn't lay me low) is to write about our approach to security.
Is the page load time that significant in bounce rates? (Your list includes A/B testing; how about figuring out if you get more emails when the marketing page is secure or insecure?)
Why would you insist on a homepage, with no secure information or login form whatsoever, have SSL security on it? Neither Quicken nor Mint do this on THEIR home pages.
But what's insecure about the marketing pages being sent in the clear?
It's common practice to setup a subdomain for your secure communications so that you aren't having to send images, javascript and public pages through HTTPS. Load times are part of the reason, but the other is that it takes more resources on the server end too.
I'd love to hear your actual reasoning on this though.
We run every single e-mail we get through Flowtown so we know a bit about who’s coming in through the open door.
For some reason, and I'm not 100% sure why, this makes me do a 180. I understand it's a beta and closed and the information is freely available anyway but it does not sit well with me.
My thought as well. People talk a lot about how social networking services tend to leak information and violate privacy. Scraping those services for your own business purposes just seems shady, especially when done through a third party.
If being an influencer and having a lot of Twitter followers is what gets a potential user beyond the velvet rope before everyone else, then why not be overt about it and let them volunteer that info?
Flowtown is the easiest way I've found to see quickly who on our list has followed @blueleafcom so I can do my invite prioritization. If there's a better way, let me know!
Make that Ten Thousand and One. This post worked on me -- awesome ideas.
I especially like that you just don't default to the blog for all content and announcements. Diversifying your news and updates across multiple channels is a great way to make it more accessible in some cases and always reaching out to new audiences.
As someone who is working on getting a product ready for launch (http://gethifi.com), this post was extremely helpful.
Great ideas, many detailed that I have not seen laid out openly before. Being very selective about "who really wants in on the closed beta" is a great point.
I really like this selective sign-in too. Making the pre-launch a scarce comodity and allowing people to invite their friends at a specific hour builds up pressure, nice!
I should remember this when I do my product launch.
seems like you're spending a lot of time and effort that could be better spent on product development. the biggest risk for your company is that you will build something that no one wants. and the best way to mitigate that risk is to have as many people look at your app and give you feedback as early on as possible. you can play games to make invites scarce and drive buzz, but you're optimizing for the wrong problem. that scarcity is depriving you of what you need most right now -- honest and early feedback! don't pull a cuil -- you need more than expectation and buzz to be successful.
Mint has established itself as the top personal finance management app out there. I love Mint, and think it'll be very difficult to move to yet another PF tool out there. So what exactly is it about BlueLeaf that is so compelling that (1) users have to beg to be invited, and (2) it stands head and shoulders above competitors?
Twitter followers: 77 Facebook followers: 75
Their tactic of making it really difficult to join the beta doesn't seem to be working so far, but he didn't say how long they've been doing this.
Be interesting to see if they get to a good number in beta. This feels a little like meaningless link bait till then.
Please post again in a few months time with how this worked out!