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“Towering” by Seryn – with Incomplete Lyrics
9,233 views on YouTube… whatever. Â This is great music.
And because I could not find the lyrics online
Oh, oh, oh, oh
towering
Oh-oh, Oh-oh
Oh-oh,
Oh-oh, towering
Oh-oh, towering
Oh-oh, towering
Oh
2-3-4-5-6
Oh that we’re only able to see now
We anticpate
What will become
This is not easy
We underestimate
Only the lonely get away unharmed
But even the lonely have their scars
Oh that we’re only moving right along
And oh-oh-oh-ohOh, that we’re only
Where this is moving
We can feel the …
Come like the sun
Know that you’re glowing
Feels like we just begunOh that we’ve only just arrived
All that we have is … inside
Only the lonely get away unharmed
And oh oh oh-oh-oh,Instrumental break
Only this one sweet hour (heart..?)
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Come Schlep with Me! Seeking Paid Content Intern at Referly
Referly enables anyone to share links to products and earn rewards when the link they share results in a purchase.
We are building out rich content pages that need a lot of curation. We’re eagerly looking for someone non-technical with a sense of style and visual composition, passion for browsing the Internet for unique and interesting products, efficient and self-directed work style, and passion for learning about working in a startup. You are the kind of person who loves Gilt Groupe, used Pinterest before it was hot, and snags the best stuff on Fab.com on a regular basis.
You’ll be showcasing the best content from our community, and coming up with creative concepts of your own for various promotions and new landing pages. You’ll build tons of public-facing content that you will be able to point to at the end of your internship and say “I made that”. You’ll be blogging, talking to customers, learning about the things people love, and creating content that will help them be successful with Referly.
The ideal candidate is open to becoming more technical but doesn’t need to be technical at all to start with. You will probably have to complete repetitive tasks and we will be happy to show you how to quickly automate them. You will learn to browse files and run scripts from the command line, write formulas in spreadsheets, pull data from databases with mySQL, tweak HTML/CSS, and argue for your awesome product improvement ideas with the team.
There will also be a lot of schlepping, not because you are an intern but because that is what startups do – you’ll be cranking 24/7 alongside the team at our office in San Francisco. Between the 5 of us we’ve worked on over a dozen startups, so we’ve got lots of war stories to share.
Bonus points if you: know how SEO works, know how HTTP works, know how the fashion industry works, can fix an air conditioner with a Leatherman
Interested?
Please send your resume, Referly profile (sign up at http://refer.ly) with some links and descriptions (we’re testing your ability to write interesting short content), and a draft blog post of how you’d introduce yourself to our community on our blog (http://blog.refer.ly) if you were a member of our team to danielle (at) refer.ly — please do more than just copy the job description, we can tell when people do that. Add your own unique flavor!
Location: San Francisco, CA
Pay: Hourly, $15-$25 depending on experience
Term: 3 months – but could become full time role with the right person
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Accidental Startup Office Manager: Ordering Food
I’ve been thinking about writing about the “less glorious” parts of operating a startup company in the past. Â This is my first post on that theme. Â Let me know in the comments if you’d like to see it become a regular series.
Before I was a “growth hacker” or even pa
rt of a successful startup, I was the only non-technical person on a team of geeks determined to revolutionize telecommunications. Â Of course the company was Twilio, and one of my early (self-assigned) jobs was to make sure we had enough Diet Coke, Goldfish Crackers, and other stuff to make the office a decent place to work.
Before you go on the typical rant “of course a girl would be put in charge of this” let me tell you – no one put me in charge of it.  In fact, I’d put it on my personal card and expense it because our team was really frugal.  And they worked ridiculously hard, and I could see that they wouldn’t eat or go grab food because it wasn’t convenient.  From what I could see, solving this problem would let them write more code, and writing more code would help us win.  So I did it.
Some of the things to consider as you are shopping:
- Where are you going to store all this stuff, especially non-perishables?
- Who is trying to lose weight? (Can you avoid ordering foods that are their weakness?)
- Who is doing low-carb or other types of diets? (Kosher, diabetic, vegetarian, etc)
- How healthy do people want to be?
- Do people need you to supply (or can you afford to offer) full meal replacements or just snacks?
- How much do you want to spend per day on food?
- How long do you think this order will last?
In the early days, any food is appreciated – and as time passes people start to have preferences and healthy concerns. I’ve created a Referly collection of products to help with your own startup food shopping list. Â In fact, I just made a $900 purchase from Amazon.com for Referly and InternMatch (we share and office) that will hopefully last us 6-8 weeks.
Important Note: We also order in fresh food from restaurants with GrubHub.com or Postmates, and pick up fresh fruit and vegetables as needed from the local farmer’s market (for us at Pier 1). Â You can also arrange to have farm fresh baskets delivered locally, or from TheFruitCompany.com to anywhere in the U.S. (disclosure by lovely brother-in-law is their CFO).
Check it out and let me know if I’ve missed any key items you recommend.
Quick Top 5 Products (for those who don’t have time to click through)
- Nature Valley Crunchy Granola Bars – 96 bars for $21 on Amazon.com
- Kellogg’s Fruity Snacks – 24 packs for $15 on Amazon.com
- Quaker Instant Oatmeal Variety Pack – 52 packets for $19 on Amazon.com
- Sugar Free Redbull – Pack of 24 8.4 Ounce cans on Amazon.com
- Office Snax Peanut Butter Pretzel Nuggets – 2 44 Ounce tubs for $50 on Amazon.com
Disclosure: If you decide to make a purchase through one of my links I may receive a commission from Amazon. Â This does not impact the cost of the product you are buying, and is generally 6 to 8% of the purchase value. Â I hope you will consider buying the products I suggest if they are a good fit for you, but if not I completely understand and just wanted to let you know.
Are you a blogger? You can create your own links to recommend products and earn rewards if people buy at Refer.ly
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Startup Gangnam Style PREVIEW TRAILER
Full length music video COMING SOON!
Gangnam Startup Style Teaser from Fawaz Al-Matrouk on Vimeo.
View more pictures and video stills here
Huge thank you to so many people for helping us make this drunken post Demo Day idea into a reality! From a couple beers and a night of K-pop, to many practice sessions, to a Facebook group of over 350 helpful friends who let us crash a wedding at 111 Minna, film at the original Facebook house, visit the set of the upcoming Bravo reality series on Silicon Valley, and take over the block of a peaceful neighborhood. We salut you, Gangnam style! Oh and sorry Google, we left as soon as security showed up…
Thank you to Fawaz Al-Matrouk who drove up from Los Angeles to do this shoot at the last minute and made it beautiful and high production. We can’t wait to release the final version, but this trailer will give you a few sneak peeks.
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Scaling Myself
One of things that excites me most about building Referly is that I am able to take figuring out the best method for acquiring customers to a whole new scale. Â Instead of working as the head of marketing for a single company, I can now literally participate in the customer acquisition planning and execution of thousands.
Referly API: Leverage Existing Users with Refer-a-Friend
The most obvious use case for Referly is to set up a refer-a-friend program on a business website and encourage existing users to participate by sharing their customer tracking link with friends.  This is what Love With Food and hundreds of others are doing, and since we launched our API hundreds of businesses have signed up to get our help generating new sales and signups.  Referly helps businesses acquire customers in two ways:
Referly Customer Acquisition as a Service: Pay for Results
When you sign up with Referly you set a reward amount you are willing to pay, usually it gets higher the greater your lifetime customer value is.
While existing users are the best and highest quality referrals you can get, sometimes their referrals just aren’t enough.  This is why we  also work to create campaigns to get you additional customers through paid, SEO, and other methods.  We make money when you get customers, because we try to acquire them for you for less than your bid amount.  That way you never pay more than your bid but you begin to access a whole new base of users.
How We Make Money: Performance
For example, if you bid $2 per new user and we are able to run a Facebook campaign that acquires them for $1.50 each then we keep the $0.50 each time. Â This starts out small but it begins to add up as we learn more about your business and work with you to refine the customer acquisition models and bring higher value customers.
Alternately, some businesses bid so low that we can’t get them customers – but we are able to run experiments and give them that feedback without them risking a lot of money up front.
Marketing of the Future
Referly has just barely scratched the surface of customer acquisition automation and crowdsourcing, but we believe what we are offering will be the distributed sales and marketing department of the future – where millions of small and medium businesses will turn first when it comes to acquiring new customers online. Â Try it and see!
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“Slow & Steady” by Of Monsters and Men
The lights go out, I am all alone
All the trees outside are buried in the snow
I spend my night dancing with my own shadow
And it holds me and it never lets me goI move slow and steady
But I feel like a waterfall
Yeah, I move slow and steady
Past the ones that I used to knowMy dear old friend, take me for a spin
Two wolves in the dark, running in the wind
I’m letting go, but I’ve never felt better
Passing by all the monsters in my headI move slow and steady
But I feel like a waterfall
Yeah, I move slow and steady
Past the ones that I used to knowAnd I’m never ready
‘Cause I know, I know, I know
That time won’t let me
Show what I want to showI move slow and steady
But I feel like a waterfall
Yeah, I move slow and steady
Past the ones that I used to knowAnd I’m never ready
‘Cause I know, I know, I know
That time won’t let me
Show what I want to show -
Post Launch Checklist: 10 Tasks Your Should Complete
Over the past week or so YC companies in my batch have begun launching in anticipation of Demo Day. Congratulations, your startup is in the news! Now what?
I’ve done 3 company launches and more than a dozen product launches, and contributed to many more. Through those experiences one of the most important things I’ve discovered is that what you do in the hours after launch is crucially important to maximizing the impact and total reach of your news coverage.
Not only did you spend an incredible amount of effort building the product you just launched, but preparing the news coverage from pitch to publish probably cost the equivalent of $10,000 to $15,000 in time (or money if you used a PR agency). Don’t go to bed. Don’t leave your desk. You’re on a mission – for this one day everyone on your team is either part of marketing or part of customer support. As far as “talk to customers†goes this is the ULTIMATE DAY for that.
Your Mission on Launch Day
Keep the website up, which really shouldn’t be hard anymore for 99% of companies, and get every possible eyeball you can back on your website.
What You Should Be Doing (TLDR version)
- Monitor traffic with Google Analytics realtime
- Get it on Hacker News and get the comments flowing
- Make your own company blog post
- Send out an email to any existing users
- Send out an email to friends, family, and existing/potential investors
- Customer support emails
- engage with people on Twitter
- share on your personal Facebook
- Update/make a Facebook page
- Comment Section on the news coverage
Not having a professional marketer is no excuse – this is a simple checklist of items and anyone can do them by simply taking it step by step. No professional marketing title or skills are required, just some writing chops and a passionate love for your customer.
Not sure how to start, what to do, or how much time they should take? This detailed guide will give you some answers to get you started.
Launch Timeline from T-0 minutes til Coverage
Monitor traffic (Immediately)
I highly recommend Google Analytics realtime because you should already have Google Analytics running on your website and its easy for everyone on your team to use. Project it on the wall or have it take over a monitor if you can. Keep an eye on traffic sources to see new places where people might be discussing the news and driving traffic back to you.
Get it on Hacker News (Launch +10 Minutes)
There are many ways to do this and I could dedicate an entire post to how to leverage Hacker News – but the most important thing is that you should not have your entire team vote from the same IP address or you will trigger the voting ring detector. The lowest effort highest reward tactic for this first news story is to ask for votes via Facebook chat and Instant Messenger, and get the comments flowing.
Share on your personal Facebook (Launch +30 Minutes)
Get the entire team to share on their personal FB pages, this improves the edgerank of the link when it gets shared on your Facebook page.
Make your own company blog post (Launch +45 Minutes)
Don’t have a company blog? Now you do. Get one on WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous, etc. and get a post out. You’ll need to switch over to something more permanent on your own domain but this is fine for now. Don’t forget to hook up Google Analytics to your blog. Your post should be unique from the news, not a sales pitch, and offer unique insight into your company and vision. Give it an eye-catching title and post it to Hacker News as soon as traffic starts to die off for the original news story.
Bonus points: share pictures of the team, screenshots of early iterations that have never been seen before, and mention if you are hiring.
Engage with people on Twitter (Launch +1 Hour)
Make sure to retweet the official tweet from the publications who cover you, in the order in which their stories go out if there are multiple. After that check out who retweets it and try to engage them. A simple “Thanks for helping spread the word about our launch!†tweet is fine, although you should try to make each tweet unique. Also engage in any more substantive conversations about your launch/product/company taking place.
If you see people with very large follower counts tweeting about you, make sure to pay special attention to them – they could be your next whale customer and can drive hundreds of additional visits per tweet.
Send out an email to any existing users (Launch +2 Hours)
Whether you have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of existing users make sure they get to share in the fun and thank them for helping you get to where you are. This is also a great time to focus the email on a single call to action: “come back and kick the tires, we want your feedbackâ€.
Haven’t sent any email marketing out? You can use MailChimp or Campaign Monitor to make beautiful email templates in minutes, without any HTML/CSS.
Update/make a Facebook Page (Launch +2.5 Hours)
Its time. List your company as a business, upload your logo and invite all your friends to like the page. Add a Facebook like button to your website if you can. Post links to all the news cover, screenshots, and anything else you think they’ll find interesting.
Send out an email to friends, family, and existing/potential investors (Launch +3 Hours)
Keep a list of people who are supporting you and your cofounders and helping your startup. This list should include your parents, family members who still don’t believe this is a real job, other press who didn’t cover the story but who are friendly to you in general, existing and potential investors, advisors, high value customers and anyone whose influence could help you build this into a much bigger business. These are your VIP insiders – make them feel special by providing your own color commentary on the launch and letting them know how their support has played a role in getting the company this far.
Customer support emails (Launch +4 Hours)
Hopefully you’ve already got support@ or help@ your domain set up. If not, get it and hook it up to Zendesk or some other dead simple email support tool you can use to manage the influx of support requests. You’ll probably need to divvy up the requests across the entire team and respond to them fast and furious if you want to keep up.
This is some of the best customer development there is. After launch is over be sure to go back and read through all the tickets.
Monitor Comment Section on the news coverage (Whenever, Maybe Never)
No one reads comments except for people who love you and want to support you, and haters. Like and thank people for positive comments, and ignore the trolls.
After Its All Over
Usually your news will break between 6am and 9am Pacific Time, and resonate with readers throughout the day. You will see a lot of traffic during lunch hour on the East Coast and again on the West Coast. It will begin to taper off around 6pm Pacific Time.
Doing Support in Shifts
The best case scenario is that your launch is so huge that support tickets are coming in so fast and furious that you aren’t sure when it will end. You may not have slept for days, and you can feel your tact and grammar slipping and its been 10-12 hours since launch. Assess your team and the volume, and depending on size and exhaustion level you have to FORCE someone to go to sleep (in the same building, do NOT let them go home you will not get them back).
You will have to force them because everyone will be running on adrenaline. You will really really regret it if you don’t do this. Sleep in 3-4 hour shifts throughout the day if you have to, but get sleep or you will hit a wall as a team and if something breaks you might be mentally incapable of fixing it.
Recovery Day
Clean up bugs, the office, and your face. Encourage everyone to sleep and not get burned out. Gather the team together and thank them for a job well done – mean it and make sure to sell the vision to your teammates at this crucial moment.
Team dinner and post mortem
Spend time together, raise some glasses and eat some seriously nourishing food. Talk about the fun, the highs, the lows, and get ready to do it all again.
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This post originally appeared on my old Svbtle blog: DistributionHacks.com
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Don’t Break the Chain
Before I decided to take Referly full time it was just a side project for a couple years. For New Year’s 2012 I set a personal goal to code every day (my job at the time was head of marketing for a developer company), and in early February of this year I decided to get serious with a “don’t break the chain” mindset.
Referly was the project I decided to rebuild from the ground up and 6 weeks into my routine I let Jeff know I would be leaving so we could start the transition plan. Â Shortly after that conversation I had some beers with Joseph Walla from HelloFax and he convinced me to at least try to get into YC. Â We all know how that turned out.
So thank you Jerry Seinfeld for your advice on productivity – it worked for me.
From the article:
He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. But his advice was better than that. He had a gem of a leverage technique he used on himself and you can use it to motivate yourself—even when you don’t feel like it.
He revealed a unique calendar system he uses to pressure himself to write. Here’s how it works.
He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.
He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”
“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.
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The First 100,000 Visits
I’ve been blogging for a long time, longer than I’ve owned this domain or had Google Analytics. Â Beyond public blogging I also keep a paper journal, and in fact cart an entire box of my old journals with me whenever I move (which has been often). Â I also wrote more than 500 blog posts on the Twilio blog, and have guest posted for TechCrunch.
Recently this blog has been enjoying some popularity but I hadn’t looked very closely at the stats. Â I fired up Google Analytics and it looks like I very recently crossed 100,000 all time visitors — from August 2008 to present — which is a bit of a milestone. Â My blog archives go back to September 2007, when I started working for the first tech startup of my life: Pelago. Â It was also a month after I married Kevin.
Some stats:
- 236 RSS subscribers (according to Feedburner)
- 222 published posts
- 197 drafts
- 100,875 visits – more than half of which were in the past 6 months
- 16.48% of visits are from returning visitors
- 3 minutes average time on page across all posts
- Average page load time 13.68 seconds (WTF!!!)
- 21.6% of visitors via mobile
Top Content by Pageviews
- Don’t Waste a Single Moment (June 2012)
- How to Hustle SXSW for Fun & Profit (February 2012)
- How I Built a Multi-User Door Buzzer for Our Apartment (June 2010)
- Got 99 Competitors & Bit.ly is One (June 2012)
- Starting Referly Took Me Three Years (May 2012)
Traffic Breakdown
- 16.7% Search
- 57% Referral
- 25.5% Direct
Top Referral Traffic Sources
- Hacker News
- Google.com
- Referly
- Twilio
- Seattle20.com
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Startup Metrics to Obsess Over
I obsess over my startup’s metrics.
I constantly have Google Analytics realtime running in my browser to monitor traffic on Referly, and throughout the day I check it to see how many people are concurrently visiting our website (scroll to bottom to watch video on how to use this tool). I can see how many are new and how many are returning, where they came from and which parts of the site their are viewing, all within a glance. The psychology of this quick data dump into my brain is powerful, either reassuring me that people are discovering us or scaring me into thinking we might live in obscurity forever.
This is one of the worst images a startup founder can imagine (an empty bank account balance is at least an order of magnitude scarier) – and I saw it this morning:
The saving grace here is that it is before 8am Pacific Time as of writing this, so traffic is just beginning to climb. However, that does also indicate that Referly is primarily being adopted by West Coast people in the early-adopter tech community. We are working hard to branch out and reach people all over the U.S. who want to make a little extra income referring products they love. Looking at you New York!
For Google Analytics Realtime, in my head I set a “low water mark” where if the concurrent visitors on the site drops below it I treat it as a red flag (and usually go tweet, blog, etc. to drive more traffic). Â For the past few weeks the low water mark has been 0, and this week I raised it to 1. Â To put this in perspective, just 2 months ago when I was using this practice at my previous company this number was in the hundreds. Â We have a long way to go.
Find Metrics You Can Obsess Over
One great piece of advice from PG, which reminds me of the early days at Twilio, is to find a single metric you can obsess over. For us, it is not web traffic because of the nature of Referly’s business, but for a lot of consumer startups being able to drive traffic successfully is a great place to focus in the early days as you are getting people to kick the tires on the product for the first time and building a word-of-mouth revolution where people are coming back and bringing their friends.
Here’s what our traffic has looked like over the pay 2 months (we launched May 14th):
The Psychology of Looking at Web Traffic
Web traffic can be a dangerous metric to obsess about, because it is fickle. The graph above is smoothed at the monthly level, and on the daily and even weekly levels you can see major peaks (launch announcements, other press) and valleys (nothing interesting has happened for 5 days ahhhH!)
It can also become a vanity metric, because it is something you can buy. Â This is a big reason why I advise companies not to take any paid traffic unless they have very clear mechanics for converting that traffic into actually revenue in a short period of time. Â For businesses with very high lifetime customer value, or high anticipated revenue in the first 90 days of a user registration, you can justify paying for traffic. Â But for social sites, meme generators, news sites, fashion sites, and any other site where the user and her data ARE the product — don’t buy it. Â If you can’t make it organically you don’t have a product yet.
The reason this is so dangerous is that once you buy traffic you will have this graph that you can make go up and to the right on command. Â Simply pump more money in, and the visits numbers will go up — probably as conversion rates go down (if they don’t then keep going!). Â As your team and investors begin to see this graph it sticks in their mind. Â People love to cling to the only scrap of apparent success in an otherwise muddled heap of we-don’t-really-know-yet. Â Beware vanity metrics, Google Adwords can be very difficult to put down once you’ve started.
Graphs That Shape Your Life
I remember attending an art appreciation session years ago lead by Lee Sandstead (OMG I just Googled him and he is Emmy Nominated now! congrats Lee!!!) where he talked about the power art has over our everyday lives. Â Simply by having it on our walls, by looking at it in passing, it shapes our world view.
The most amazing observation was that it doesn’t even have to be art one likes. Â Take for example the most common piece of artwork found in the Western world, Ave Maria – which is the baby Jesus sitting on the lap of the Virgin Mary. Â Definitely not a piece of art I’m into putting up all over my house (I’m an atheist).But Lee made this amazing point — it would be better to have this artwork on your walls than nothing. Â If he lived in a world where this was the only artwork allowed (as was the case for hundreds of years) he would welcome it.
It would shape you — you would look at it from time to time and reflect on it. Â It might be simply religious symbolism to you at first, but over time it also might take on other meanings and conjure up other thoughts and memories. Â It would become a point of conversation, maybe with other people, but certainly with yourself. Â It would become a dialogue you returned to over and over again – anything from the mother to son relationship, to asking why he gazes at her but she does not appear to return her gaze to his eyes. Â You might have questions about the halos they wear on their heads, or maybe what she is reading, or why his torso seems so misshapen.
Metrics are the startup version of Ave Maria.
Stick them on the wall, talk about them with each other, reflect on them privately, turn the data this way and that way in your mind trying to understand what it means. Â Forge new connections. Â Place two graphs next to each other which you assume are unrelated and test that assumption.
Metrics You Should Consider Obsessing Over
Here are some other metrics you might consider measuring and understanding. Some of them are more important than others to different kinds of businesses – and what you really want to look for is a single metric that can really tell you whether you are succeeding or failing.
- Visits & %Â Unique Visitors (you could have very high visits because you have the same people coming back over and over again — not a bad thing! Â but important to differentiate from the number of truly unique people)
- Change in your bounce rate over time (are people who come to your site sticking around? Â is it what they expected to see when they clicked through from wherever they were before?)
- Number of times your website is mentioned each day on Twitter
- Number of sites advertising against your website on Google, Facebook, etc.
- % of users who come back more X times
- % of users who come back and perform an action more than X times
- % of users who contribute to revenue
- % of users who have made a “round trip” in your product (completed the GOAL of the product)
- Average number of days (or hours) it takes for a user to go from signed up to achieving the “round trip”
- Signup conversion rate (by day of week, by region, by time on site)
- Email open and click through rates (transactional emails vs. newsletter emails)
Some of these things can’t be tracked with Google Analytics alone, I definitely suggest checking out Pardot and Kissmetrics for more sophisticated event tracking.
There are probably many more, and I’ll keep adding to this list. Â Do you have a startup metric you obsess over? Share it in the comments and help your fellow entrepreneurs.
How to Use Google Analytics Realtime
Great video from Darren Rowe to help you get started
