Lessons learned: From 0 to 70,000 downloads in 30 days

Lessons learned: From 0 to 70,000 downloads in 30 days(baydin.com)

89 points by baydinalex 15 years ago | 7 comments

wccrawford 15 years ago |

"Make a product people want, everything else you can fix later."

That's the real meat there.

cloudkj 15 years ago |

From the articles, it looks like the extension isn't listed in the Mozilla or Chrome galleries. Is there a reason for this? How do you think it affects the distribution and exposure of the product?

ayemoah 15 years ago | |

We just wanted to control the growth before we got all the bugs ironed out. We didn't know how well our servers would scale, and we don't have a support staff. Not having the plugins listed certainly does impact the distribution and the exposure of the product in terms of volume - when we come out of closed beta, we'll have them there.

One of the big advantages, though, is that we also get to have more self selecting and passionate users this way and they tell others who would care.

cloudkj 15 years ago | | |

Cool. Good luck to you guys! One suggestion is that you guys should look into releasing a Safari version as well. Since it's Webkit-based, it takes almost zero effort going from Chrome to Safari. I recently wrote a Firefox extension and was able to port it to Chrome and Safari quite easily, since it's pretty much all Javascript.

lifeoffbi 15 years ago |

awesome piece and great lessons learned. a word of advice, from personal experience of having a start-up featured in NYT, Forbes, Businessweek, RWW, etc launch news to pubs is about 50X more interesting than updates or follow-up stories. as someone who has used and referred the product, i am providing a word of caution that you really need to think about opening other channels to get reach because your 3rd month referral traffic could very possibly be less than 20% of this month's.

jacquesm 15 years ago |

Beware of the pit of despair though, media coverage is like fireworks, it goes up and then explodes with a bang to fall back to the ground. Make sure you engage your users and make sure that you get enough of a tie to them that you can entice them to come back.

In the case of a download add a feature that checks for updates and maybe 'newsworthy' items that you can present to your users using the app.