Matt Brezina, co-founder of Xobni, posted a fantastic presentation on the company’s three and a half year journey from idea to 3 million subscribers. Matt goes into detail into detail on the different stages of the product delivery cycle:
- Super Stealth – 50 users
- Private beta- 2 months, 10k users after TC50
- Early adopters – 3 months, 12k users
- Organic growth – Invite beta: 3 months, 50k users
- Iteration – 3 months, 60K users
- Public beta – 1 year, 1.5 million users
- Exit beta – 3 months, 2M users
- Paid drivers to increase sign ups – 6 months, 3M users
Five tips that will make people care about your ‘stupid little start up’
1) Tie yourself to a bigger trend (read: what market forces will support your organic growth?)
2) Take every opportunity to meet a journalist in person (read: go out and network)
3) Engage with users: positive word of mouth is even better than press coverage (read: hire customer support early)
4) Journalist are lazy. Help them be lazy (read: create a media resources section for your site)
5) Be a source of data (read: content is important, create lots of it and make it useful for the user)
See the Slideshare Embed here:
Founded in 2006, Xobni provides an Outlook add-in that saves you time finding email, conversations, contact info & attachments. The basic download is available for free and a premium version will cost you $29. Some of the best features include email search, automatic address book, phone number extraction and finally an automatic connection between outlook and the social web.
Hat tip goes to @Ahoova, a social media addict and a virtual friend, for the fine recommendation on Twitter.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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