Cavootle is a brand new trending website based on geotagged polls. Cavootle Soft-Launched on April 27^th and is currently in public-beta mode.

Having an initial audience is crucial for any social media website and can easily make or break you. When we started Cavootle, we knew that in addition to a brilliant team to design and build it, we would need two things to earn our audience:

1. 1. A great story to tell with our product
2. 2. LaunchRock to get that story out.

Every product has a story.

What makes Cavootle fun is the ability to see what users in a different area are thinking. Eventually, as more and more Cavootles are created and voted on across the globe, users will be able to access the site while traveling to see exactly what the locals love. Cavootle will be a great tool for learning about local culture. It will be just as great for those who want to find the best of the best without searching through agonizing and outdated reviews.

Your story + LaunchRock= engagement

In a Go-No Go meeting we had an epiphany: Our Launchrock page was good — but only in English. How are we going to claim to be an international website if we are only in one language?

We began spanning our resources and managed to get all of our LaunchRock content translated into 8 different languages. This included our initial landing page, share page and initial email.

As a result of this we amassed hundreds of international followers and had numerous page views from users clicking on the other languages.

So how did we do it?

In order to have multiple languages, we simply created several different LaunchRock accounts. We even went to the painstaking detail of creating different dialects. For example, French from France and French from Canada are spoken slightly different. We wanted to make sure we didn’t lose anyone based on a dialect issue.

This flexibility was key as it gave us unique insights in regard to the demand for different languages that we would need in the future. With a little ingenuity and creativity we were able to link all these pages seamlessly and make a BIG statement.

Every product has a story. My advice is to define it, find out who would be interested in that story and create a landing page that conveys your story without a user having to read a bunch of text.

LaunchRock: What have you done to increase customer engagement on your website or your launchrock page?  We’d love to hear your tips in the comments.

Wearabl is a retailer and publisher focused on helping underground brands reach more customers, sell more of their products, and ultimately make a living doing what they love while giving our customers deals on awesome casual clothing, and other stuff you can stuff a burrito of awesome with.

If all went well, Tristan (my cousin and fellow co-founder) and I should have launched our little company last night from the awesome rock-n-roll diner in Santa Monica called Swingers. Here are a 2 key things we learned while LaunchRocking the #@$% out of Wearabl (and how you can LaunchRock the #@$% out of your company, too).

1. The trick to creating a landing pages … make ‘em sexy

2. Create a relevant incentive for your community

Of all the reasons Tristan and I were attracted to LaunchRock, the single most powerful feature that stood out for us was the capability to incentivize the sign up form, and more importantly, track referrals. It was all built in, which meant we wouldn’t have to worry about losing track of referrals and in turn create a poor customer experience later. We spent the past few months experimenting with LaunchRock to find what works, discovering what doesn’t, and ultimately learning how to attract the right people to our LaunchRock form. And we’re really happy we did!

Make ‘em sexy

We all know the importance of keeping the landing page simple — the more focused the page, the more likely the visitor is to sign up. But keeping it simple is only half the battle in terms of building your launch list. It’s gotta be sexy. Your landing page has to drip with reasons why the visitor should sign up. Let’s start with the visual style of the page itself; is it interesting to the visitor? Does it tease them in some way?

The first version of the Wearabl sign up page featured a large image of a few hangers on an empty clothing wrack in the background, because it was super-early. Later, we created what you see here … the fully stocked clothing wrack represented the fact that we had connected with independent brands and now had awesome underground clothing to share. It was just a fun way of expressing the evolution of Wearabl.

It’s not just about visuals though … sexy landing pages require a sexy hook, too.

Create a relevant incentive for your community

As mentioned, LaunchRock gives you the capability to create incentives and track referral, so one thing Tristan and I thought about for a long time when incentivizing our sign up form was the actual incentive and how it affected the launch list. We knew we could easily attract people by giving away an iPad or something to a random selection from the sign up list, but that would mean our list wouldn’t be as pure as it could be. We didn’t want to attract people just hoping to win an iPad … that’s not who we wanted following Wearabl. We weren’t concerned with launching to a massive number of people, rather, we just wanted to launch to the right people.

We decided to give people $1 Wearabl credit for every person they referred. While it might not be the best choice for everyone, it proved to be the best for us because it enabled us to keep our sign up list focused on people interested in what we’re doing and reward people for spreading the word with something valuable and relevant. So in our case, the $1 was mightier than the iPad …we miss you, Steve.

How are you guys incentivizing using LaunchRock?

We’d love to hear how you’re incentivizing yourLaunchRock sign up landing page — if you have a moment, jot down what you’re doing in the comments section. Let’s find out what’s working and what’s not working for various niches. Tristan and I are really happy to have worked with LaunchRock for our launch, and highly recommend it to you if you’re thinking about joining.

Editor’s Note:

Whichb.us is a simple, beautiful way to navigate public transportation, first started at the Seattle Startup Weekend in January 2012. What makes WhichBus special is that it combines both trip planning and real-time bus information in just a few easy steps, all within one app.

Startup Weekends are 54 hour-long events where developers, designers, and business people come together to work on an idea, beginning with open mic pitches on Friday. Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas, practicing lean startup methodologies and building a minimal viable product. On Sunday evening teams demo their prototypes and receive feedback from a panel of experts.

We wanted to make the most of our demo on Sunday night since there were
over 150 in attendance, so we decided to create a LaunchRock page. Turns
out that was a pretty smart decision. Since creating our page, we’ve had over 1,300 visitors and 270 signups, fora 20% conversion rate. According to Google Analytics, 42% of this traffic has come from direct sources, 32% from Facebook, 8% from Twitter, and everything else had less than 5%.

Here are 5 lessons for rocking your own startup weekend launch:

1. 1. Keep your signup field about the fold.
2. 2. Redirect the main domain to signup page.
3. 3. Make the social sharing buttons visible.
4. 4. Don’t forget mobile.
5. 5. Promote your page.

1. Keep your signup field about the fold. When we first created the
LaunchRock page, there were all kinds of links and information, which
pushed the signup form below the fold on some laptops. Once this was
removed, conversion rate increased 2 – 3 percentage points.

2. Redirect the main domain to signup page. Sounds simple, but I’ve
seen a number of sites not do this and we received a ton of traffic on our
main page that never would have made it to the LaunchRock page otherwise.

3. Add in sharing buttons. I can’t stress this enough. Add in sharing
buttons, especially Facebook and Twitter, and test to make sure they work
well. Also make sure it’s easy for people to re-share (e.g. there are
enough character spaces for people to re-tweet the full message).

4. Don’t forget mobile. Approximately 20% of our traffic comes from
mobile, so make sure everything looks good on your phone.

5. Promote your page. Just before we did our demo, we tweeted out our
LaunchRock page so everyone live tweeting could pickup the URL. We also
created Moo Cards with our LaunchRock URL to handout at events.

One thing we would have done differently is provided an incentive for
sharing, such as being entered to win something monetary, like a bus pass.

In conclusion, we’re glad we set up a LaunchRock page so we can hit the ground running when we launch and I encourage all other Startup Weekend  groups to do this same.

Dear LaunchRock Legacy Customers:

On Monday, April 30th, 2012 at 12:00PM, LaunchRock will be retiring our Legacy platform. If you created Your account after November 8, 2011 you are on our current platform and this retirement does not affect your account.

If you are on the Legacy platform, your account, site settings and data will migrate safely to our current platform. However, once Legacy is retired, your landing page will be down until you update your DNS and re-launch it in the new platform.

We do this with tremendous gratitude to you, our beta testers and early adopters. Based on everything you taught us, we have been able to build a much better product and a much more solid platform. So thank you, thank you, thank you! We would not be here without you.

To re-launch your account in the new platform:

1. Go to http://app.launchrock.com/login and log in with the same e-mail and password you’ve always used
2. Complete a few newly required fields in the LaunchRock site builder and check over your settings
3. Update your DNS
4. Re-launch your site!

Detailed instructions can be found here

If you have any questions, feedback, or ideas, as you work in the new platform, you can reach us through the ‘Ideas & Support’ tab in the lower lefthand corner of the site.

Thank you for being with us from the beginning!

Team Launchrock
http://launchrock.com
hello@launchrock.com ]]> http://launchrock.com/blog/legacy-retirement-and-migration/feed 3 http://launchrock.com/blog/add-a-skin-to-the-launchrock-widget?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=add-a-skin-to-the-launchrock-widget http://launchrock.com/blog/add-a-skin-to-the-launchrock-widget#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 08:24:59 +0000 Nate http://launchrock.com/?p=1896 Continue reading →]]> Editor’s Note: This is a guest blog post from Chris Smith,  founder of Blitify – A browser-based design and animation software & creator of FlashIsDead.com. You can follow Chris on Twitter @StartSequence

Flash Is Dead.

Flashisdead.com is a page created to gather beta testers for a design & animation software that I built.  Using Javascript and HTML5 elements, you are able to accomplish almost everything that flash can do.  I’ve built a nice UI that allows you to take advantage of them even if you aren’t a programmer.  Currently it is only available in beta to users that sign up on flashisdead.com.

The following is a guide to how I was able to customize the LaunchRock widget to match my design while still maintaining all of the features that make LaunchRock great.  I broke it down into two parts:

I. Build the widget in the admin                                               II. Customize it on the page:       

          1. Customize the CSS 
          2. Customize the text box
          3. Customize the submit button
          4. Style out the error message
          5. Center the Social Icons on the page

             I was able to use the Launchrock Widget to put together a custom, full-featured landing page in no time.

Part I: Build the Widget with the LaunchRock Sitebuilder

After signing up on launchrock, the wizard walks you through the process of building the page or widget.  Below, I’ve outlined some of the most important parts of each step as I walked thru building out the widget.

Step 1:

  If you are using the widget, selecting this minimal theme means less customizing work later.

Because my design didn’t call for many of the features available, I toggled them off using the visibility settings.

Step 2:

Be sure edit the text in the social widgets.  I added a “#flashisdead” hash tag so I could follow the action on my twitter feed.

Step 3:

Plugging in a google analytics id allowed me to see that I was also getting a high number of visitors from France.  Awesome!

Step 4:

Choose “Widget” from the radio buttons.  I wasn’t using the background image or the logo on the widget, so I turned those off.  Also, because this widget was going on a page that I created, the css was already in place – no need to include it here.

Step 5:

Using the widget, I was confused about whether I should “Launch”.  You don’t need to; just press the “Update Preview & Generate Code” button and place the code into your your page.  Now you’ll want to style it out to match the theme of your site.  A nice professional look goes a long way in convincing users to sign up and spread the word.

Part II: Customize the Widget on the Page

I began with a simple .ASPX page (you can even use straight .HTML if you want) and added some images from my design, added a title to the page, etc.

Tip: Starting with a reset css like the one included in http://html5boilerplate.com/ will go a long way in simplifying your cross-browser testing.

Add a link to the reset css in your page
<link href=”/Content/Site.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />

Add the widget to the page
Copy and paste the widget code from step 6 in the wizard into your page.  Open it in a browser to verify that it’s there and works as expected.  It should look something like the image below.

The widget didn’t look much like the design comp, but customizing it was super easy.

I used Chrome to inspect the widget on the page and saw that each major component had a unique ID that I could target from my CSS file.  The important parts for me were the email text box and the submit button.

Customize the CSS

I added a section to the bottom of my css file where I put all of my LR specific styles.
Using the IDs I found in the source view, I reset the margins and padding for the main form area.

Customize the text box

I’ve added comments so you can see how I modified the text box to give it that inset, faded look.

Customize the submit button
My design required that the “Go” button look quite different.  I added a background image to the button and used text-indent to move the “Go” text out of the way.  I had to add !important to the button image to override the default.

Don’t forget to Style out the error message
I changed the text color to a nice pink to match the design.

Center the Social Icons on the page

Depending your design, you might not need to do this, but this is how you center the social icons that pop up after users fill out the form.

The Final Result

You’re ready to start blasting out the link to your social networks.  Be sure to give credit to @launchrock for a great service.  The word can spread pretty quickly.  Watching the signups on the LaunchRock Dashboard is addicting!

Don’t forget, you can always log into LaunchRock and and update your widget, then jump to step 5 and regenerate the widget code.  Copy and paste that back into your page and you are golden. Tip: Be careful when modifying certain portions of the wizard (especially the social sections), they will update your live widget on the fly.

Happy Launchrocking!
Chris

Editor’s Note:

Go Media works with clients on the typical offerings of brand development, print and web design and marketing strategy. MockupEverything is a new web app for artists and designers to use to quickly visualize their designs on real-world objects in 3D.  The goal is to help designers with their craft and have fun doing it. We sell our design resources at arsenal.gomedia.us

Here are my 6 designer’s insights into how build a well branded LaunchRock landing page:

1. A great launch starts with a great product.  Designing a great LaunchRock landing page all starts with having a product or service that’s actually good.
2. Brand it from the beginning. The right design targeted at the right audience goes a long way, so start branding from the beginning with your LaunchRock page.
3. Use intrigue to make it look amazing. If there’s something secret or hidden about your product don’t just ignore it, instead make sure you communicate that intrigue with your design and copy!
4. Engage your current customer base. Offer something worthwhile to your current customers that you know will excite them.
5. Keep your rewards simple. Avoid confusing your potential customers with overly complicated rewards.
6. Find the influencers in your niche. Invite the influential bloggers or customers in your niche to participate or even contribute to your launch.

Lesson 1: A great launch starts with a great product. It all starts with having a product or service that’s actually good. If you are putting out a product that’s a sub-par version of something that’s already out there, that’s a bad start. Does your product do a good job of selling itself?  It needs to, because LaunchRock doesn’t give you a lot of room to explain it. Does your product look sexy and well-designed? Does it do something unique or clever that people will want to share with their friends? Does it do something better than the competition?  If the product isn’t done yet, is the idea of the product enticing?  You need to nail this right off the bat.

Lesson 2: Brand it from the beginning. On our launch page, I used a blurred out homepage mockup of the app to tease it a little bit. The app isn’t even done yet, but my mockups were good enough to blur out and give people an idea of how it might look. It also helps to have the name of your app be enticing enough to get people hyped up. The name MockupEverything makes it pretty clear what it is to any designer, and it sounds useful and appealing. I don’t need to do a lot to try to sell what it does. It really helps to be able to say what you do in just a few words.

Lesson 3: Use intrigue to make it look amazing. If there’s something secret or hidden about your product that people want, then don’t just ignore that. Make sure you communicate that intrigue with your design and copy! I’ve gotten excited about LaunchRock pages that advertise an app or service with a name that’s completely arbitrary and there’s no description of what it is. It simply LOOKS good, or LOOKS like a useful app. That’s branding right there

A well-branded app pushes all the right buttons for the right audience. The background image you use has a lot to do with this. For example, say you are launching a new app called YumBotlr. What if there was a fresh and cute dog mascot with its tongue hanging out and a Facebook icon underneath him sitting in a pile of drool with the tagline, “Doing things with Facebook you never thought possible.”  I would have been like WTF!?  I don’t care what it is. I just want to know!  Sign me up!

Lesson 4: Engage your current customer base (if you have one). We’ve been working for 6 years to earn fans and followers through social media and the release of design tools and tutorials. That shouldn’t be taken for granted. Your average startup might not have this brand equity already, so it might be more difficult to get the word out. But for brands that do have an existing customer base, you should already know what kind of product they would like and what kind of rewards they’ll want. If you make a great product, your current customers will be your best evangelists.  Offering a reward you know they’ll want, like a free PRO version, will excite them and motivate them to spread the word. For MockupEverything we are offering the PRO version for free for an entire year if the user refers 10 or more people – we had over 3,000 signups in the first week.

Lesson 5: Keep your rewards simple. If you don’t have a preexisting customer base, the reward needs to be enticing enough to get people to share. If you are launching a web app with a premium subscription model, giving away free subscriptions is easy. If you sell digital products, giving a big discount on the release is also good. If your site offers a free subscription, give them access before anyone else.  If you have no subscription, products, or payments, then you’ll have to give some other incentive or reward. Just keep it simple.(Editor: Read more about partnering for the perfect reward in FabFitFun’s guest post)

The first time we used LaunchRock to launch a product was my book, Thread’s Not Dead: The Designer’s Guide to the Apparel Industry. We offered people a 10% discount for every 10 people they referred. If they referred 100 people, they would get 100% off the book. This seemed like a great idea on paper, but people got confused and thought it was 10% off for every person they referred. If your rewards need a few paragraphs or examples to explain, you’re going to lose people who aren’t willing to read it all.

Lesson 6: Find the influencers and promote your launch to them by writing guest blogs about your app for other sites in your niche. Its also good to try to involve the influencers directly in your launch in some way. If you’re writing a book, have them contribute to the book and give them credit. If you’re making an app, why not give them the PRO version for free and give them some discount codes to give away on their popular blog.

So to sum up, LaunchRock is best used to promote a new product or app that’s worth the hype. Good design, intrigue, simplicity, and a big reward are key. Good luck!

Editor’s Note:

With very little effort, it’s super easy to tweak the LaunchRock subscription widget to fit seamlessly into your new startup’s pre-launch landing page and animate it.

This post gives step by step descriptions, including code, of how I did it on our Skyscrpr LaunchRock page by:

1. Using the LaunchRock Admin to hide the elements I wanted invisible.
2. Creating an override CSS file to modify the bounding box, hide elements the LR Admin had no toggles for and set style & positioning.
3. Animating the introduction of the widget to draw attention to it.

1. Settings things up in the LaunchRock Admin

Landing Page

Under Page Theme, I chose the last option, with black text and a transparent bounding box.

Hide all of the elements you don’t want via the LaunchRock admin’s Visibility Settings toggles. (No, you can’t remove the “powered by launchrock” badge.) I removed the Announcement Bar, Tagline, Description and Instructions.

Use the Save & Continue button in the upper-right to move on.

(Protip: Navigating to a different step in the process via the 1–6 tabs will not save the changes made on your current tab.)

Sharing Page

The visibility settings for the page are a bit less powerful than I’d prefer. You can’t remove the text above the buttons via a toggle (I remove them later with CSS), nor can you remove the links underneath the Share Link (again, a bit of CSS to the rescue).

Domain Settings

Using your favorite text editor, create a blank file and save it to the public webspace of your choice. (I named mine the creative `lr-override.css`.)

Choose Widget, toggle Show Background Image & Announcement Bar and Show Logo / Site Name off, and enter the public URL of the CSS file you just uploaded in the field for URL of Custom Stylesheet.

Click Update Preview & Generate Code, then copy out the freshly generated code from the first textarea and paste it into the HTML of your landing page.

(I recommend copying the Facebook Open Graph code as well, although you’ll probably want to customize it a bit. That’s outside the scope of what I’m covering here.)

2. Creating an override CSS file

Modify the bounding box

First thing I did was to modify the bounding box to remove all shadows, borders and background colors. I believe the Page Theme set above is what is giving my particular div the `.light-c` class, so double-check what yours is if this code doesn’t have an effect.

.light-c .site {
background: none;
-moz-box-shadow: none;
-webkit-box-shadow: none;
box-shadow: none;
border: 0;
}.

Hiding things the LR Admin had no toggle for

There’s a couple of elements you’ll need to hide via CSS. Use your favorite browser’s inspector to target them all or use mine as a starting point:

.lrdiscoverwidget .site-tagline,
.lrdiscoverwidget .site-desc,
.lrdiscoverwidget .inviteform label,
#launchrock .invite-label,
.lrdiscoverwidget .share-via-email,
.lrdiscoverwidget .social-links,
.lrdiscoverwidget .live-stats {
display: none !important;
}

Style & Positioning

Lastly I made some style and positioning tweaks to the text field, submit button, sharing buttons, and LaunchRock logo:

.lrcontent .twitter {
margin-left: -7px;
}

.lrdiscoverwidget .share-link {
margin: 0 0 4px;
}

.lrdiscoverwidget .like {
text-align: left;
height: 30px;
}

.lrdiscoverwidget .site {
padding: 0;
border-radius: 0;
width: 100%;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

.lrdiscoverwidget .inviteform {
margin-bottom: 3px
}

.lrdiscoverwidget .site-powered-by {
text-align: left;
}

.lrdiscoverwidget .inviteform .field {
margin: 0 4px 0 0;
border: 2px solid #333;
}

.lrdiscoverwidget .inviteform .submit {
padding: 0;
height: 33px;
line-height: 32px;
position: relative;
top: 2px;
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #AED7D5 0%, #63C9C3 3%, #40C4BC 49%, #34B3AC 100%);
background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #AED7D5 0%, #63C9C3 3%, #40C4BC 49%, #34B3AC 100%);
background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #AED7D5 0%, #63C9C3 3%, #40C4BC 49%, #34B3AC 100%);
background: linear-gradient(top, #AED7D5 0%, #63C9C3 3%, #40C4BC 49%, #34B3AC 100%);
}

.lrdiscoverwidget .inviteform .submit:hover {
background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, #C6D4EB 0%, #6094EB 3%, #4884EB 49%, #3B7CEB 100%);
background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, #C6D4EB 0%, #6094EB 3%, #4884EB 49%, #3B7CEB 100%);
background: -o-linear-gradient(top, #C6D4EB 0%, #6094EB 3%, #4884EB 49%, #3B7CEB 100%);
background: linear-gradient(top, #C6D4EB 0%, #6094EB 3%, #4884EB 49%, #3B7CEB 100%);
}

.lrdiscoverwidget .site-powered-by {
padding: 0;
}

3. Animating the introduction of the widget

Because the widget won’t allow me to hide specific elements via the admin, they get rendered to the page until my CSS has a chance to remove them. This can cause an ugly flash of unwanted content. I went with the (slightly hacky, but very fast to implement) option of hiding the widget for two seconds then animating it onto the page, giving the styling a chance to happen “behind the scenes‚” before presenting it to the viewer.

The end result is a bit of dramatic flair, drawing attention to the subscribe field; it imbues a ‚ “most important part of the page‚” vibe.

Dan Eden’s animate.css was instrumental in quickly adding a CSS-only effect that looks great across all devices. (Especially since CSS animations are natively hardware-accelerated.)

I assigned my bounding div for the LaunchRock section .animated .fadeInUp classes, then in the main CSS file for the page gave the div -vendor-animation-delay: 2s; , to delay the fadeInUp animation two seconds.

There you have it – a LaunchRock widget you can integrate and animate into any design. Leave us a comment when you’ve got your LaunchRock page up, we want to check out what you’re working on! (Don’t forget to sign up for access to Skyscrpr – if your site runs advertising, you’ll want to pick up what we’re putting down.)

Editor’s Note:

GOTHAM Bicycle Defense Industries is making bike accessories that protect urban cyclists.  Our first product, The Defender, is a bike light that locks onto your frame to prevent theft.  It’s the World’s First Anti-Theft Bike Light.  Ultra-Bright LEDs, Ultra-Light Aluminum. The Defender is live on Kickstarter now.

When I told my Babula (grandma) I was starting another company she said, “You have three degrees.  Why can’t you find a job?”  While Babula’s generation believes entrepreneur = unemployed, our generation believes entrepreneur = rockstar. Think about it. Techcrunch is our Rolling Stone.  SXSW is our Woodstock.  TEDx is our CBGB and Fillmore East. My MIT Sloan classmate talks about rooming with Dropbox’s Drew Houston in college as if he traded PB&J with Keith Richards in grade school.

And how do all rockstars get started? With a little help from their friends.

Here’s our five lessons for a friend-fueled viral launch page to help you get the most out of your personal network to spread the word about your company.

1. Ask for help: Your friends care about you and want to help you succeed.
2. Lines, Not Dots: Share a story line with friends not just a snapshot.
3. Snipers, Not Shotguns: Target small circles of friends with catered emails.
4. Keep it fresh: Continually show your friends how your business works.
5. Don’t be annoying: Be comfortable asking for help, but don’t over do it.

For Gotham, LaunchRock has been a friend support multiplier. Within days of launch, we reached hundreds across the country without leaving our apartment.  My buddies are as pumped about the Gotham launch party as if it were a Pink Floyd record release party.  They’re calling dibs on our first batch of t-shirts. We also learned a lot about virality along the way.

1. Ask for help Your friends care about you and love watching you succeed.  This is simple but powerful.  Human beings take pleasure in helping others.  The first step is asking. There’s no shame in it.  When your friends launch companies, you’ll support them just the same because you’ll have been through it.

 2. Lines, Not Dots At my previous startup, my favorite angel investor used to tell us, “Angels invest in lines, not dots.”  Meaning they won’t give you money if they see your company as a point in time.  They want to see a progression.  Friends invest the same way, emotionally.  They love seeing you start go from idea to product to company with customers.  So start early.  My first email to friends was, “I just moved in with my mom and have an idea for a new company.”  The second one asked for input on our company name.  This week I’ll be showing them our final prototype.

 3. Snipers, Not Shotguns Never shotgun blast your friends a mass message.  They won’t read it.  If a friend BCCs me on a mass email, I won’t respond.  If a friend CCs me on a mass email with a bunch of strangers I’ll be annoyed.  If you email me directly, I’ll respond.  Sending individual emails to your 50 friends will feel and sound robotic.  Instead, think of circles of friends: my cycling friends, my undergrad buddies, my relatives, etc.  Each circle has a common bond and each email can address them personally.

4.  Keep it fresh Jason Fried, one of my favorite entrepreneurial authors and CEO of 37 Signals, wrote, “Give people a backstage pass and show them how your business works. Think no one will care? Think again.”  We gave backstage passes to our friends and fans showing off ugly sweater bike rides, late night machine shop hacks, and first working prototypes.  The loved it.

5. Don’t be annoying Ok, so you’re comfortable asking for help.  But don’t overdo it.  Don’t email them constantly.  Don’t repeatedly ask them to share your LaunchRock link.  If you feel like you’re getting close to annoying, you probably are.  Stop.  Wait a few weeks and come back with something fresh.

We will never have thousands of fans waiting for us when we get off our private jet.  But with a little help from our friends and a viral amplifier like LaunchRock, we can all hit the ground running when our companies hit the main stage.

If you want to join in on the fun, head on over to this site. We’ll hook you up with everything you need to promote and party in style: American Apparel discharge screen print shirts, extra durable vinyl stickers, and fully stocked party bus with your logo displayed on the outside.

We’re also partnering with a few friends to set up a little retreat away from the madness for our RV and the LaunchRock caravan. There will be some music, some campfires, some drinks, some competitive shenanigans and, most of all, good times with your fellow LaunchRockers. The party buses will be running between the campground and the downtown activities every 15-30 minutes. Specific details about events will be released as we get closer to SXSW week.

Rock Austin with Launchrock

Editor’s Note:

We’re ClearBox Media — our goal is to make exploring your community and discovering things to do more fun and interactive. Towards that end, we are currently building City Recess – a fun game that rewards you for going to events and places that you find fun and interesting.

To help us design City Recess as a fun, interactive game that helps users effectively solve the high priority problem of how to “find new activities,” we took 3 important steps which are explained in depth –including the corresponding code– in the body of this post:

1. 1. Conducted a series of user interviews to identify 16 important sub-problems inherent in that single high priority problem.
   
2. 2. Built a user test using a Grails platform with CouchDB as the backend that will test each sub-problem against all others to create a ranking of highest to lowest priority.
3. 3. Used cookies to allow us to A/B test and feature-switch based on a user’s vote by giving each voter a unique identifier.

User Interviews: The predecessor to City Recess, was The Human Mosaic Project, a game designed to help get you out of your house and explore your local world by enticing you with points for specific assignments. As we talked more with our players — using the Lean Startup process — we discovered that what they really wanted was help finding cool events and things to do in their city rather than making up their own things to do. We also realized that hidden inside of the specific problem of “Find New Activities” were many sub-problems that made it potentially difficult to find new things to do. Our challenge now became determining which were the highest priority for our users. Was it finding things to do with friends? Was it seasonally challenging? Was it because stuff wasn’t all in one spot? Or, something else entirely?  Combing through the interviews, we came up with 16 possible sub-problems that we needed to weed out and rank in an efficient and statistically relevant way.

User Testing:  The goal of our user testing was to determine a ranking of our sub-problems by testing each sub-problem against all the others — 16 assumptions/problems for a total of 120 matches. If you’re interested in the math, this is a combination problem in which we’re choosing 2 from a possible set of 16 with no repetitions and the equation comes out to n!/(r!(n-r)!) = 120.

Once we figured out the technique we were going to use, the next step was to actually code it. We chose to use a Grails platform with CouchDB as the backend, primarily because that’s what we’re most familiar, having used them for develop The Human Mosaic Project. (We’re also aiming to make this a full-fledged experiment plugin for Grails — eventually to be open sourced — to help developers write their own feature-driven experiments.)

For our experiment we have three important pieces – Current Response Set, Voting and Users. The Current Response Set is initially pulled from the list of 120 possible responses (see above). After a user votes it is recorded and we check to see if it is time to grab the next set of responses or if we need to keep the same set for the next visitor. Each user can only vote once over the life of the experiment, but this is configurable should we decide to change it. Before a visitor is presented with an option we check to see if they have voted before. If they have not then we pull the current response and allow them to vote. The cycle then continues for the next user.

Tracking Users: Once a user visits the site, they get a cookie as their unique identifier and we record which answer they voted for. Now, in the future, we will use this identifier to only allow certain people to see a specific feature when they visit a given section (A/B test), or even see a feature at all (feature-switching). Currently, we are only letting each person vote once, though we might decide to open it up further so that users would be allowed to vote on a separate match they hadn’t seen before.

Once they’ve voted, we record their vote and return them to the page upon which we display our LaunchRock signup page. Once they signup and and share, they are given their own LaunchRock URL. Now comes the fun part. When a user visits our page for the first time, we look for two things (warning: Groovy code ahead, but it isn’t too painful, honest):

String existingUserCookie = g.cookie(name: "USER_ID")
def lrRef = params["lrRef"]
def fbRef = params["fb_ref"]

if(!lrRef && fbRef) {
    lrRef = fbRef
} else if(!lrRef && !fbRef) {
    lrRef = "[custom ref we generated]"
}

Then we check to see if they’ve already voted and show the page, but we pass in the lrRef variable we retrieved from above and use that to generate our voting URL. Once they click on the URL, we grab it again and LaunchRock picks it up because it’s in the URL already.

From the backend point of view, we are tracking each match, user (by anonymous id), and what they voted for. Once we finish with this, we should have a really good idea what our top sub-problems are, along with gaining some new users!

Editor: Once you’ve found your problem areas, you may want to find Beta Testers from your current Customers or Sign-ups. PicYou’s guest blog talks about how to do just that.