My First Product ‘Broke’ Twitter and Then Crashed Hard
By: Martin Delaney
Tags: Marketing, Startup, Business, Entrepreneurship, Founders

My First Product ‘Broke’ Twitter and Then Crashed Hard

Celebrities were “harmed” in the making of this story.

Background from Ryan Cryar

It was late 2009. I was working in a corporate banking job and had just launched my first ever product online as a “side hustle”.

It was a “social polling” network called WhatPoll?

Basically, a website where you could vote up or down on things in lists about movies, restaurants, historical facts, etc and “debate” the merits with others.

The idea was to build up an engaged community and then monetize via advertising and affiliate partners.

I had spent the previous year reading a ton of literature about building Internet businesses and companies in general — search engine optimization, landing page optimization, guerilla marketing, “how they got started” stories, etc.

Despite that, there wasn’t really a user acquisition or growth plan. And, by that I mean our approach was just to launch and “figure it out”.

There was certainly no paid advertising budget, so we’d have to get creative.

To give you a feel for the site, below is a homepage screenshot.

Image supplied by author.

Yes, it was basic and looks very dated today! But, “good enough” to test our hypothesis.

Launch day was soon upon us, which basically just involved pushing the website live. Then nothing much happened.

*crickets*

For a while, the only people visiting the site was myself and other founders. No presence on Google. No traffic deals. No social traffic. No network to tap into. Nothing.

So, we started to experiment with ideas and made some adjustments.

First up, we introduced polls that were of a more compelling nature to consume — humor and curiosity. The intention being it would make the site more shareable on social media and other websites.

So, instead of a generic list like “Best Disney Movie” it would be stuff like “Strange Place Names” or “Coolest Cat With a Hat”.

This had little impact in the beginning but later worked to a degree.

We’d occasionally get blasts of traffic to polls from social bookmarking sites like Fark or Reddit, and mentions from other media outlets.

We quickly grew impatient and wanted to get our product “out there” in a big way. So, other ideas were researched and “brainstormed”.

This led to an interest in a relatively new feature Twitter had launched, Apps — integrated through an API.

We observed that another polling website was using this functionality to generate traffic to their website. Someone would vote, and it would automatically tweet their choice.

So, pretty quickly, we had our own App up and running.

Now, folks could sign up to our product with Twitter. Every time they voted it would tweet out their choice to their followers automatically, with a link to the poll on our website.

It was engineered in such a way that if people were compelled to vote it would “blow up”. One voter, on average, could spur more than one other person to vote, so the behaviour would grow exponentially.

In the first few days nothing much happened.

*crickets again*

We started “tweet voting” using our own personal Twitter accounts on a range of polls, but this didn’t go anywhere. Not enough followers.

Plus, the subject matter just didn’t resonate enough to compel folks to vote at a rate that would “make it go viral”.

Some questions were raised.

How do we get Twitter “power users” to vote or encourage voting? And, what subject matter would be compelling to their audience?

Then, an idea surfaced.