Starting Up by Rahul Pathak

Andrew Chen has a great post on his blog entitled “Why Bloggers and Press Don’t Matter for User Acquisition.” I often find myself nodding as I read his posts and this one is no exception. Press & Blogger buzz while it drives traffic, often has no connection whatsoever to driving users and user engagement.User acquisition is a critical part of any startup’s evolution and it’s surprising how often entrepreneurs can fall into the ‘build it and they will come’ mindset. I was at an event recently where a handful of startups were presenting their companies to a panel of VCs and CEOs. After one pitch, a panel asked the entrepreneur what his customer acquisition strategy was - “How are you going to get people to use your product?” The response was along the lines of - “Well, they just need to try it out and they’ll love it.” Unfortunately, he didn’t have a good answer as to how they were going to hear about it in the first place.You need a clear user acquisition strategy and Andrew has laid out a useful framework for thinking about it. He also has other great post on Viral Loops and social network monetization. Happy reading.

I’ve been spending more time with Facebook lately and I’m very impressed. Not only does Facebook make it incredibly easy to see which of your email correspondents are on the site, they also prompt you to upload your AIM contacts.

Viral prompts are integrated into every aspect of this site’s behavior and it works. For example, I tagged a friend in a photo and as I typed in his name, a subtle email box appeared asking if I wanted to let him know.

What’s great about this is that it’s contextual, not intrusive and feels useful as opposed to spammy. No wonder they’ve been growing like crazy.

Tagged has been touted as one of the fastest growing social networks around and after I got an invite this weekend, my interest was piqued. I went through the sign up process and came away pretty impressed at their model. I’m not surprised they have massive viral growth. You can’t actually sign up without letting the system go through your address books and opting you in to inviting friends. Whatever your feeling on this, it helps spread the word.

The ‘upload your contacts’ step is used by every social network out there but this is the most aggressive implementation I’ve seen.

Step 1: Quick sign up that requires a full first/last name, email address and password.

• One thing I like here is the use of dynamic bubble help. It may get annoying after a while but on the whole, a slick implementation that adds more than it takes away
• Also, note that you’re opted in by default to receiving offers. Permission marketing rules

Step 2. All your email are belong to us

• You can’t proceed to step 3 (which I assume is profits) without uploading your contacts.
• The real genius in this step is that they bank on the fact that people re-use passwords. The one you entered in step 1 is pre-populated in the password form. The rest of us talk about lowering the barrier to conversion, these guys are living it.

Step 3: Spam Invite your friends

• Friends already on Tagged are shown here. The rest of your book is preselected to receive an invitation from you
• They do provide an unselect all option but it is definitely a little scary when you have to click “Add Friends” to continue.
• Don’t worry folks, no one I know will be getting tag spam from me

Step 4: Photo Upload

• Photo upload. Makes sense, nothing special here

Step 5: More Genius - let’s get a mailing address if they’ll give it to us

• This form makes it feel like you need to input a mailing address to proceed. Fields are labeled required in red.
• This isn’t shown to everyone. I signed up using a couple of emails and didn’t get it every time (they’re optimizing/testing)
• In fact, you can hit “Pass” to skip this step, but it is non-obvious
• Makes sense, if you can get physical in addition to email contact information for a bunch of people that have already opted in to receive marketing offers, why not?

Tagged is definitely one of the most aggressive adopters of viral growth that I’ve seen. Can’t say for sure if there will be a backlash or not, but there’s no doubt that their signup process creates massive growth for them. In their defense, they do make it easy to cancel your account, which one could argue is the least they could do.

Whether or not you like their choices, you have to respect them.

To quote Andrew Chen, (who I found via Matt):

Too annoying? Or too ruthless?
Some might say that they hate the fact that these processes exist, and that they might be too ruthless or even immoral. These points are definitely worth debating. I certainly believe that if you’re able to create a engaging user experience, adding these techniques to the front-end isn’t bad.

If you believe that:

• Ruby on Rails makes development easier
• Product creation is cheaper
• Infrastructure is cheap

… then the corollary is that there’s more competition. Breaking out of the noise in any way possible, even if ruthless, will be a key technique for success in the Web 2.0 world.

Here’s to breaking out.