We hit pretty far out of the park this month. Our unique visitor growth was 51% and our Page View not only hit, but surpassed the 1MM mark. One month we were below a million, the next month we blow past it.
At this point we have enough traffic to measure with a very low margin of error how changes on the website (sampa.com) or the service (individual sampa sites) affect visits, page views, sign up, viral, etc.
Notice that the number of Pages served *excludes* all search engines, crawlers, bots, feeds, email images, Ajax or any suspicious requests. We are very conservative on that front. They do include all traffic to our three categories of traffic: sampa.com, Sampa sites, and Design sites.
PS: With this kind of traffic, we know for a fact that would put Sampa on the top 10 Seattle Startups on Alexa, but we are #24. Why? One word, I mean, one tag: IFrame.
We managed to increase our email confirmation rate from 69% to 85% in just three months. How did we do it?
First of all, if you have not used Sampa, when you sign up on sampa.com we require that you confirm your email address (you get a message with a link) before you can start creating your site. This is quite common between some services, not on others.
On our case, we must do that, otherwise spammers and sploggers (?) would be creating fake blogs and sites on Sampa and pointing at their content just to improve their ranking on Google and Technorati. So we can't really eliminate this hurdle on the sign up process. (Note: some blog platforms and site creation tool don't have that, and they get lots of spammers).
Back in February/March, when we had less than 70% of users confirming their email address, we thought that was pretty high number of users that sign up for the service and yet never got to confirm the link. So back then I did an investigation to what was causing it and the usual suspects appeared, typos on the email addresses, fake email addresses, being caught on Junk Email, etc.
Fixing a few of those, we've got our confirmation to go from 69% to 79% in two months. By 79% still felt quite low. I mean, 20% of the people that sign up never got a chance to try the service. That is very disappointing.
Recently, our rate jumped from 79% to 85% (last two months) and I have absolutely no idea why.
The point here is that you should assume at least 10 to 15% of the users that sign up for your service/site are using unreachable email addresses.
Simple, just create a board for your organization with 35 members!
Can you imagine what a metting or conference call of the WSA is?
Why don't they create a board of 5-6 members and have 30 advisors? That would seem more logic to me... But wait, that wouldn't look as good on the resume of those 35 people and then Microsoft would complaint they only got an advisory position, while Google got a board sit, yada, yada, yada.
This is not about speech recognition or voice synthetisers. This is about why my computer doesn't send me an email when it needs some attention.
Let me give you an example. The only way to find out if your computer is running out of disk space is when you try to copy or install something and fails, or if you go to your disk and check its usage. Now, it may very likely be that an event was logged on the Event Log, a very non-friendly tool that every Windows OS uses to record warnings and errors on the computer.
Why not send me an email? When I setup my computer I would be more than happy to provide 1 or 2 email addresses for my computer to contact me if it needs some attention. Now, dear engineer that is going to implement this feature, I don't want to know that it lost connectivity with the Internet, or that application XYZ crashed, or all the other annoying notifications that every single application give to you.
I want to know only the important stuff. Only the stuff that requires my immediate attention.
Another example besides the disk-full would be when my daily backup fails. I have this external hard-disk and I created a little batch job that compresses and saves all my files on the external hard-disk. I tell my wife when the house is on fire to get the kid, get the cats and get the external hard disk and run. That's how important it is to me. Now imagine after the fire I found out the last successful backup was 2 months ago. The job was failing day after day yet my computer never told me.
These are the events I would likely to be sent an email about:
Disk is full
Bad sector found on disk
CPU fan or powersupply fan failed (or is about to fail)
Room temperature is too hot or too cold to operate safely
Backup failed
Virus/trojan found
Unusual Network activity (SMTP bot?)
Unusual CPU activity (100% for too long).
Critical updates not installed successful (or pending installation)
Disk needs to be defragmented
That would make my life so much easier and give me more trust into computing in general. Wasn't this what Trustworthy Computing was all about?
Nathan Kaiser from nPost invited me to participate (and present) at his Entrepreneur Round Table event that he's organizing -- this time was the second edition.
This is a very interesting event where just a handful of entrepreneurs sit together to discuss one of their businesses. This time, Sampa was selected and everybody gave feedback on it. At this event I had the opportunity to talk to Tony Wright (from RescueTime), Matt Cassarino (CoolToors) and Nathan himself.
For the longest time I have the feeling that nobody can help more an entrepreneur than another entrepreneur. It's a matter of empathizing with what you are going through, understand the obstacles and know the outcomes of certain decisions before you make them. If you don't know what doing X will do for your business, maybe another entrepreneur knows exactly what will happen.
If Nathan invites you to participate, go for it. Not only you'll get to know a few new folks, but you'll definitely learn something new that you can do to improve your business.
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, but we are #24. Why? One word, I mean, one tag: IFrame.
October, 2007