I like imagining the other end of this. Walmart notices guy starting to gain some traction with a competitor. They use their private army to "convict" him and hold him prisoner. Which private army fights to get him free?
Well it was interesting. He asked us if we had a link to the drug dealer article. We looked and couldn't find one. I was in contact with him the whole time, sent him links to other criminal results and even offered to do the interview over and be less specific and say "criminal" instead of "drug dealer". I told him the merits of the story were still true, we could still show that Pete shared google results with a criminal, and we even put him in touch with the person who worked at the company who found the results. Instead he posted the article implying it might not be true, and said when he asked us about it "we went silent". I followed up with him after and he said that he didn't seem my emails (even though he answered some of them)...
We were worried that people would feel the same way, but in general we only got good responses from the interview. We signed a lot of people up, too.
That said we've been careful to be much more specific in the future. We don't want to mislead people especially since it could hurt our brand. The truth is, Pete's results were a mess and it was hurting him. He shared a name with several criminals. There really was a drug-related article about a Pete Kistler but we can't find it (we never thought to keep it)--so now we only say "criminals" and link to the articles we HAVE found
I agree, it is disingenuous, especially in this context. That slide was specifically made for an in-person presentation that was later posted online (it was posted by somebody else about a year ago). For the sake of a presentation, we thought that image got the point across much better than putting two hyperlinks on the screen. It was basically a design decision. In retrospect we should have put a disclaimer on the image since it looks so realistic, but we honestly had no idea the presentation would live beyond the room I spoke to. That was a mistake
We used to use a similar type image on our about page, but for the same purpose now only link to exact articles or results we can still find. https://brandyourself.com/info/about.
Thanks man. I remember that interview (it was a headache). The interviewer seemed to have an agenda going in. Before the interview he kept saying he thought it was "foolish that people would use Google to research people in the first place" and that "nobody should believe Google results anyways".
When Pete was in college there were several criminals who all shared his name and his results were a mess. One of them included a story about someone suspected of dealing drugs. At the time we never thought to save or bookmark those results because we had no idea we'd be starting a company and being interviewed by NPR years later.
We couldn't find an exact article about a drug dealer (perhaps it actually was taken down). We WERE able to show him several other results with about criminals with his name. We linked him to them. When he asked us about it, we told him we couldn't find it, but we offered to redo the interview and be less specific "Pete was being mistaken for criminals with the same name" since we could show results for that.
In his article he claims we simply did not respond to these requests. When I asked him about it afterwards he apologized and said "he must have missed that email". He didn't update the story though. It seems like he wanted to tell a story about how online reputation management helps people permeate lies and that's why you shouldn't trust Google.
All that said, we learned a valuable lesson. We no longer use the term "drug dealer" we use "criminals" and we link to specific articles we're still able to find so people can't question the validity
Basically anything around 8% is considered very good. We spent ALOT of time optimizing our sign up flow. We did hundreds of usability tests. I think the key was making it clear what the product would do and why they needed to complete each step. We tweaked language until nobody in a usability test seemed confuse. We removed any step that people didn't actually need.
We continue to focus on this. Even as we've grown we've maintained a free sign up rate of 15%
I think it depends on your business model and audience. As a b2c product, any press is good obviously. However, I think it's more important to understand who your audience is and how to relay your story to them in a way that's digestible and understandable.
I think this was the key takeaway. Making a product people want is the first step. The second step is boiling it down into a message people quickly understand. If we described our product as "DIY SEO tools to improve your personal SERPS" people would quickly overlook it. However, by emphasizing the story/benefits, people see how it relates to their life. "Improve what shows up when employers, clients or even dates Google your name". That's way easier to understand
My name is Patrick, I'm the CoFounder of BrandYourself and I'm the one who made this presentation. I read HackerNews everyday, and was literally knocked off my chair when I saw my own presentation on the front page. Thank you
I've gotten some great feedback. Some of you have asked some great questions so I'm going through now to answer as many of them as possible.
In the meantime, some of you mentioned this would be more consumable in a blog post. Here's a link to the original blog post I wrote about this--it actually includes a lot more data
There are actually a lot of different databases that match IP addresses to companies, university's etc. For example, Max Mind GEOIP has some of that info. The trick was just compiling those different sources into a more reliable custom database. We still have a lot of work to do to continue to improve that database
Yes within the company we've adopted a motto "customer service is the most underrated marketing channel". I think this is what has driven most of our steady growth which comes through word of mouth
That's a very good question. We're not a social network or a game, so most people come to us to solve a specific problem: they don't like their Google results. We have a free product because we realize many people simply want to be more visible, they want to make sure their portfolio or linkedin profile actually shows up. Other people have more to promote or are trying to bury something embarrassing. These are the people who use the product more and pay for premium.
To answer your questions
"How many converted to paying"
--about 3% converted to paying, which is slightly lower then our normal traffic (4-5%). A lot of the "non-converts" were part of the foreign traffic we eventually moved to a wait-list until we can enter those markets with a more strategic plan
"How many retained"
--This is an interesting question. Most people used the product, 3% paid. Remember, our product is meant to be free, so many people do some upfront work and then just check their email progress reports to make sure everything is still OK. Our email open rates have never dropped below 60%, so many people are retained in the sense that they check those emails. We'll have people who signed up during that surge that will pay us for the first time today based off one of those emails
"How many told their friends"
About 75% of users tell somebody else. This is based on a user survey. The problem is, almost all of them tell people in person. They tell them over dinner, or at an event when someone mentions their Google results. We haven't figured out a way to capture that same rate through online vehicles.
Exactly. We already had the MVP--the key here was boiling down our product into a value proposition people could quickly understand. Rather than saying "we can match an ISP to a location and company" we said "you can figure out if an employer or ex gf googles you"