How a single person can make a huge difference to your startup in 24 hours
There are some days in a startup you will never forget, the startup roller coaster has been widely publicised.
Sunday September 9th 2012 won’t be forgotten by us @tray. One of our super early users (we love you @Joelambert) had kindly replied to a smashing magazine tweet letting them know Tray was the new email tool in town.
An innocuous looking mention appeared in our task bar, which after investigation showed they had tweeted about us. Almost immediately lights started blinking as our site was also submitted to Hacker news (whoever you are we love you too).
We shot up the front page and hit the #1 spot, where we remained for the whole day (we hear Sunday is especially great for HN love).
With an average of 3 signups every minute for the next 24 hours we saw the biggest explosion in our beta waiting list to date, all off the back of the simple vision we set out on our landing page. It’s certainly one way of getting you out of bed on a lazy Sunday.
As twitter went crazy for Tray, we were presented with a fantastic pre launch opportunity to engage with a massive audience about their inbox skills, frustrations and all the magic they’d love to see Tray performing. This data is continually referred to, and helps shape the decisions we make today.
The key takeaway for us was never to underestimate the power of that single person - They might just be golden. We can attribute some of the biggest intros, best feedback and general evangelism to some of the most unexpected of people. Most of whom we have never met!
Never let your respect for these people slip, even if you are a little weary eyed. We made sure to engage with everyone and target the first few minutes after being contacted as the sweet spot to build conversations.
It’s the relationships you build with your early followers that will see your product reaping the rewards down the track. We are focused on responding personally to every single email we recieve, something which we’ve carried on as we invite more and more people to try Tray.
This has allowed us to work closely with our users on an on-going basis to the point where we are now able to bounce new ideas and plans off our select group of whizz kids.
Tip of the hat to you all, we love you dearly.
