I first started working on Weebly in February 2006. I worked for about a year on it with Dan and, later, Chris' help, and we launched a (very) early version of Weebly in mid-November 2006. We were TechCrunch'ed a few days later, and accepted into Y Combinator the same day. (On the morning of our YC interview, we woke up to discover we were on TechCrunch).

Weebly has been growing ever since then, gone through two complete visual redesigns, added numerous features, and doesn't even resemble the product we launched with at all.

Here's two of our graphs from May 8th 2007 -- five months after we moved out to San Francisco and had been working on the product full-time:

The first is a graph of our new signups per day, and the second is a graph of our total user count per day. I've annotated the top graph with what events caused the major spikes.

There's actually two very interesting things to note about the top graph: First, we had already closed our angel round at this point -- looking back, our investors placed a huge amount of confidence in us.

Second, the new users per day looks like it might actually be declining a little bit.

At this point, I'd been working on Weebly for about a year and a half, and we'd been launched for over six months. Judging by the graphs, you might think things weren't looking spectacular. This is the type of situation when people give up.

I've seen it quite a bit among startups -- they spend more time developing the product than they do running it after they launch it. Several have followed the same pattern: build, build, build, launch, quit.

But you've got to keep with it to gain momentum. It doesn't usually just build overnight, it takes time. Keep building your product, and eventually you gain momentum and a critical mass of people who know about you and tell others about you.

Now, here are the graphs from a couple weeks ago:

These graphs look a hell of a lot better. There's 2 things I'd like to point out:

- First, the "build it and they will come" mentality is a fallacy. You need to build something great and have distribution in order to succeed. And distribution is hard to get.

There are many ways to get distribution. One of those is through press. If you have a great product, the more people that find out about you, the more people will know about you. And they'll tell their friends, who'll tell their friends, etc.

Another subtle press benefit: you're getting links from a bunch of very highly-regarded sites, and this helps out your rankings in search engines quite a bit, which builds more traffic.

There are plenty of other good ways to get traffic too, such as engineering for viral growth, but press can have huge benefits for the right product.

- Second, in order to get people to use your product, you have to stay alive. This sounds obvious, but a ton of people spend 6 months building a product, launch it, and give up within 3 weeks.

Plain and simple, it's going to take time for people to start using your product -- there are exceptions, but it's generally not the norm. So you need to expect that, and be willing to give it time. If you give up within a month or two, your product definitely won't be successful.

Once you launch, people start to know about you. If you launch early, you can start earlier on the process of acquiring users. Don't launch with a crappy product -- launch as soon as what you have is better than what is out there. But don't wait for a perfect product -- launch as early as you can, get user feedback, and keep improving the product.

 


Comments

Paul Stamatiou link
02/26/2008 01:35

Great read as usual David.

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Issyk-Kul Karakol link
02/26/2008 03:23

That's the good reading and graphs for new online apps creators - start early with minumum working basis.

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Ross Hill link
02/26/2008 04:56

Insightful charts, thanks for posting!

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Robert
02/26/2008 05:32

Really interesting read. I'm currently in a startup with exactly the same characteristics: also about 20k users after a year, two TC posts, etc. It's tough sometimes to keep motivated. These kinds of articles help a lot, as well as being a bit naive and staying true to your thirst thought when you started the company.

And you're totally freaking right about the distribution part. That's something most people overlook but also something you really want to think about early on.

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Raffy Banks link
02/26/2008 07:50

I completely agree with your points and can attest to:

"...in order to get people to use your product, you have to stay alive. This sounds obvious, but a ton of people spend 6 months building a product, launch it, and give up within 3 weeks."

Years ago I gave up on a project that I was quite passionate about simply because I was getting so few signups. Even though I was getting tons of traffic I assumed people had no interest in what I was offering so I prematurely abandoned the project instead of figuring out what I was doing wrong.

You are right, persistence is key.

Thanks David

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Steven Romej link
02/26/2008 10:37

These posts have been helpful and inspiring, thanks.

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Luke Seeley link
02/26/2008 11:00

Haha, it looks like that second Techcrunch spike actually cuts through the top of the graph.

I'm glad you stuck with it, you guys make a superb product.

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Shafqat link
02/26/2008 15:11

Great post! We're having these discussions daily at NewsCred. Its a fine balance between launching too early (i.e. crappy product) and launching early enough to get good, iterative feedback. But you hit the nail on the head - distribution is key. Getting good press and TC coverage can make or break a startup, so its worth focusing on distribution almost as much as the product itself.

Congratulations on your well-deserved success!

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Mark Hinkle link
02/26/2008 16:00

Great post, I witnessed the same phenomenon with the "Slashdot effect". We make an open source monitoring solution that was Slashdott'd twice in 30 days. Getting the attention is great but having a great product/service when all that traffic arrives is paramount. Those two posts generated tons of traffic and we capitalized on organic search and links for many months then on.

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Gustaf Alstromer
02/26/2008 22:27

This is a great post David!

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Guglielmo link
02/27/2008 03:19

I agree.
Launching early & working hard to stay alive => attracting an audience.
Of course, the next step after that is to keep growing fast enough to become a big player, before competitors get your idea and copy it.
I think many "send your own video" sites started at about the same time, but only one of them hit the big time, i.e. YouTube. How?

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shawn link
03/10/2008 09:22

I've been spreading the weebly word ever since I started my music blog. I wish you well with this project. After all, I've spent waaaay too much time with this blog for you to just give up, phhhh.

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Matt link
03/21/2008 10:43

Some good points there David. I'd be interested to hear how Techcrunch heard about Weebly before featuring you online? Did you approach them? How did they discover your project?

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free press release link
03/22/2008 03:15

Hi Matt,

Only Mike Arringtons knows what will be featured in his blog. Press is definitely a great way to announce your product to the world. If you are not budget constrained use services like prnewswire.com or prweb.com . It costs $300 or less to distribute a search engine optimised press release. If you are just starting out, you can use many free press release sites. Here you can get a list of 50 free press release sites. Soon we are planning to post a detailed report with page rank, alexa traffic rank etc. Services like PR.com, 24-7pressrelease, theopenpress.com are good. Some are free. Most of them costs less than $30.

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free press release link
03/22/2008 03:17

Sorry I forgot to post the link. Here is the <a href='http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/paid-service-pressreleasepoint-com-posting-50-free-press-release-websites#sitelist'>list of 50 free press release distribution sites</a>

Our site is http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/

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Eugene Ware link
08/13/2008 06:28

Do you think that you'll overtake squidoo soon?

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Wayne
08/31/2008 10:58

Awesome article. We're also in a similar situation as you. Our web 2.0 site has a small but growing user base.

Explore, Learn, Review
<a href='http://www.codesplunk.com'>http://www.codesplunk.com</a>

Reply
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09/24/2008 01:13

Hi, David
Where I see vacations in Weebly?
Regards, Dsasser

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Angela Via Baila Baila link
10/03/2008 02:14

Hi, David
I'd be interested to hear how Techcrunch heard about Weebly before featuring you online?
Regards, Via Angela

Reply
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10/29/2008 01:47

If you are just starting out, you can use many free press release sites. Here you can get a list of 50 free press release sites
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10/30/2008 05:25

Hi,
If you are not budget constrained use pr services
Regards, Susan

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Drug Rehab Cost link
12/29/2008 19:43

That chuck norris thumbs up made me comment. That has to be the funniest thing I've ever seen!

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press release writing link
01/03/2009 02:57

Wow, I never knew that The importance of launching early and staying alive. That’s pretty interesting...

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angus link
01/08/2009 11:12

Insightful charts, thanks for posting.

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ZK@Web Marketing Blog link
05/03/2009 09:51

Weebly is heading towards an era, where it would be able to challenge the blogging giants like blogger and wordpress. Even drupal is going to have a tought competition with the weebly, whatever the weebly is creating waves.

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coupon link
05/07/2009 12:13

I completely agree with your points. After buiding great product, you need to broadcast the product. Then you have to stay alive so people can continue to use your product, give you feedback, then you improve the product.

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club penguin link
05/31/2009 00:33

I've been spreading the weebly word ever since I started my music blog. I wish you well with this project. After all, I've spent way too much time with this blog for you to just give up.

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Kids Games link
09/01/2009 14:35

Weebly is an excellent tool for people first starting web design on the internet. Great to read something from the voice behind Weebly.

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