How To Split An Atom

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Ted and Mike recently talked about Pownce, the Kevin Rose sponsored Twitter lookalike that had its season of blog fame a few months, and how it might be making its way to the Deadpool. The proof lies in the Alexa (and Compete) traffic numbers that show a huge spike in traffic followed by a crash that seems unlikely to reverse itself soon.

This same graph is repeated over and over again by Web 2.0 companies. After an initial strong launch, the traffic reverses in on itself and usually returns to just above pre-launch numbers. How can you stop this? Well, lets take a look.

Avoid Press Blindness

When you first launch, everyone will want to talk about you. Especially if you have a high profile founder or are otherwise in with the techset. You have to realize that none of this press is worth anything to you. Sure it will expose your product to a large number of people, but exposure alone will not make your product successful. Worse yet, tech media is notoriously fickle. Just as quickly as you became a media darling, they’ll forget about you completely.

What does matter then? These are a good start.

Product Conversion

Imagine that you knew the maximum number of people who would ever use your product. In the weeks after press coverage 30% of those people will show up at your door. If you don’t impress them immediately or provide the with unique value, they will leave and never come back. That’s right, they’re gone forever.

Make certain that your product is ready for launch. That doesn’t mean that it’s perfect, but it does mean that your unique selling point is shining through. All you need to do is give early adopters an inkling that your product could be great. If you do, a much larger number will be willing to come back.

Follow Up

Great. You have a flood of new signups, but soon you realize that 80% of these people just came to look. You might never be able to convert them into users, but you can often use them to figure out what is wrong with your product.

Contact users who you haven’t seen in a while, contact users who only used your service once and then stopped, contact users who were active and then went idle. All of these people will tell you changes that are critical to your future success. Don’t spin your wheels trying to intuit users behavior, do the research.

Don’t Believe Your Hype

Most web products that get any coverage at all will get, on average, positive coverage. Why? Most publishers won’t write about a small company unless they like the product (or hate it a lot). The point is that it is useless to try to sell people who already like your idea.

You should be much more concerned about publishers in your target demographic who have refused to talk about you. Their reasons for not caring about your widget likely represent serious weaknesses in your product.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Have a plan. Media coverage is not a marketing plan. After you “spread the good word” how are you planning to get new users into the door? If you don’t plan ahead and instead rely on patently insane marketing ideas like “word of mouth,” you’re setting yourself up for a crash. If users happen to spread your message then you are extremely lucky. For the most part, however, they won’t and you’ll need to reach them in another way.

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