Three Ways Fetchnotes Used LaunchRock To Create Earlyvangelists

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Alex Schiff, the co-founder and CEO of Fetchnotes. You can follow Alex on twitter at @alexschiff and @fetchnotes and like them on Facebook.

I really like LaunchRock. It’s one of those services that doesn’t try to be more than the problem it’s solving. It just works for what I need it to do, and there aren’t many tools that do that. But in order to take advantage of its potential, you need to think about what your goals are.

At Fetchnotes, we’ve been using LaunchRock as a means to engage with the early adopters of our industry, and so far we’ve had about 440 signups out of 8,000 page views. This translates into a roughly 5.5% conversion, including all of the repeat pageviews, bots and ourselves incessantly checking things. It’s not critical mass, but we’ve been able to leverage LaunchRock in combination with Twitter to learn more from those 440 than most companies probably do from their first 10,000. Here’s how we did it.

Experiment

For the first couple weeks of our LaunchRock page’s life, we threw up a background picture, filled in all the necessary info, and let it be. We didn’t even change the welcome email. Stupidly, we wondered why the only signups were our friends and family. Where’s the virality?

On a hunch, I rewrote the introduction email and really sold the product vision. I laid out our problem in a way everyone can understand and said clearly how we were going to solve it. The next day, I saw dozens of people I didn’t know sharing our link on Twitter. That momentum continued and soon we had our first 100 signups and then our first 200. We got our first write-up from that group and they became our core learning base and earlyvangelists. Here’s what that email says now:

Thanks for signing up for Fetchnotes, the notepad that organizes itself in the cloud.

We’ve all been in a situation where we’ve needed to quickly jot down a note – be it an awesome idea, a task or something else – and devolved into texting or emailing ourselves. Pen and paper are too old school. Current tools force you to spend more time organizing your notes than you do acting on them. That’s why we’re building a better way.

Using our product, all you have to do is write your note, add a tag, and we’ll send it to wherever you want it to go. Rather than imposing a rigid system on you, we allow you to create your own structure through your usage and tagging. Notes with #todo are sent to a do list, and ones with #ideas are categorized with your other ideas — it’s as simple as that. And all your information is synced and no more than a few clicks away anywhere, anytime and on any device. It just works.

Please keep on sharing with your friends via Facebook, Twitter or email (make sure to use your referral link: [REFURL]). You can also follow us on Twitter @fetchnotes, or read our bloghere.

You can see how many friends have signed up by entering your email again.

Tell us how you currently keep track of to do’s, ideas and other notes by emailing alex@fetchnotes.com. We’d love to hear about your experiences with other apps and services, and how we can make a product that you’ll love to use.

Are you a blogger or journalist that covers apps and technology? Please feel free to email alex@fetchnotes.com if you’d like to preview our service or cover our launch.

Thanks!

The Fetchnotes team
alex@fetchnotes.com

Because we sold the vision so hard, it really excited people to share their referral link. It’s a little long, but through experimentation I found that the more I explained the product, the more people shared the link after signing up. That’s a good sign. We’ve also done some crude A/B testing of the background picture, description and pretty much everything else. This has helped us figure out what keywords, phrases, images and concepts resonate the strongest with our audience. This is critical in determining whether your product idea is viable or not as well as the best way to market it.

Be set up for virality

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that setting up a LaunchRock page alone, with its built in sharing tools, is a substitute for setting those systems up yourself. Wrong. If you’re not active on Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, you can kiss those viral loops goodbye.

A new signup is far more likely to share your link if they see that you’re active on social media and engaging with new signups in a meaningful way. They need to believe that there is a tangible benefit to joining your community. At Fetchnotes, for example, the people who promote us actively and allow us to engage with them are the ones who have the strongest voice in influencing the final product.

Besides, being active is the only way you’re going to get followers as a new startup. You have no brand. You have no product (if you do why the heck are you still using LaunchRock?). You’re still far away from people finding you through their own searching. Put yourself out there and be proactive. Do whatever you need to do to get more followers that are genuinely interested in what you’re doing — they’re the earlyvangelists who will promote you and make your reach exponential. That genuine part is important too. Sorry, but all those I<3Bieber and ImABelieber Twitter bots won’t help your startup succeed.

Engage. Learn. Repeat.

Any time someone shares our link on Twitter, I tweet at them something along the lines of, “thanks for signing up! What are you using now to keep track of tasks, ideas and other notes? How can we make it better?” For some reason, that person felt a strong enough connection with your value proposition that they wanted to tell their friends and followers. I need to figure out why.

As another means of engagement, I email anyone who has generated a lot of clicks on their unique URL. I introduce myself, ask them what intrigued them about Fetchnotes and try to learn about their current workflow. That last part is of the most interest to me, and it’s where the core of our customer understanding has come from. I’ve had long, detailed conversations with dozens of our LaunchRock signups about why current tools are or aren’t working for them, and this has very positively impacted our product development.

This is likely because of our lean startup emphasis on customer learning, but I think that’s the most important way you can use LaunchRock. It’s not just about amassing emails. It’s figuring out why some guy browsing the Internet on a Sunday afternoon was interested enough in your two-sentence blurb to not only give you his email, but promote you to everyone he knows. It’s about understanding as much as you can about who he is, the problems he has and whether or not he’s willing to pay to have them solved.