It’s been about 2 days since I started actively marketing Soapbox. I thought I’d share some of the things that have been happening in the hope that you can benefit from these experiences in your own business. It’s been pretty interesting so far.
I sent out announcement emails to approximately 500 people who were in my address book. I know about 200 of these people pretty well, at least well enough to send a semi-personal email. As for the other 300 people, they’re either acquaintances who I don’t know very well or they’re people I don’t remember. I figured I’d send the announcement to all of them. I haven’t spoken to many of the people I emailed in a long time so the announcement has triggered a large number of catch up emails.
So far, 88 people have signed up on Soapbox and they’ve written 154 reviews. I’m pretty excited about the progress and I’m in no real hurry. I’m perfectly fine with gradually spreading the word about the site and gradually improving it over time. Don’t get me wrong, I’d be excited if it went viral but I’m OK with gradual. I’ve never done any marketing so I’m excited to learn more about it by actually doing it.
The internet is pretty wild. One friend submitted Soapbox to a blog site with thousands of subscribers and it was accepted. Thanks Craig! Soapbox also showed up on another blog I’ve never heard of. It was submitted there by someone I don’t know. Here are the references on the two sites:
http://www.emilychang.com/go/ehub/
It was surprising to see references to Soapbox out on the internet so soon after starting to yap about it.
I’ve also got a few interesting statistics. Before the marketing blitz, Soapbox was getting about 700 hits per day. Since the marketing campaign started, it’s getting about 22,000 hits per day. So, there are certainly folks taking a peek at it at this point.
It remains to be seen whether the site goes from “something a little interesting that Duff’s been working on” to “this is a useful site that provides me value.” It remains to be seen whether it goes from a site that a few people use to a site that’s remarkable enough that people feel compelled to tell their friends about it. Seth Godin has taught me that customers can do a way better job of marketing a product than I can.
The questions remain, what can I do to make the site that remarkable? What can I do to make it very easy to spread this idea virus? I’m going to be working on answering those questions in the coming weeks.