This is a post in an ongoing series about ClassHill.
Lessons from Marketing in August
In the month of August, our marketing efforts were held back by the inefficiency of our Social Media Campaigns. It is here we started thinking carefully of how we wanted to pursue marketing for the rest of the year and after meetings with other startups founders, we found a way.
Despite the lack of our marketing success, August netted us nearly 15k unique visitors and 1k new users to the platform. In August, we had also released a feature called "Classmates" where we would ask users for their interests and then suggest similar users on the platform based on their input.
While I was expecting this feature to fail, and indeed, it did... We noticed something rather unusual; on average, all new registrants picked an average of 13 interests for their profile, netting a total of 13k interests added. This was surprising. But I do think there are a few reasons which justify such effort on the user's part;
- It was fun adding these to the profile, and
- It made the profile more personalized (which later became the basis of many other UI/UX improvements)
On average, we saw significant growth in all aspects of ClassHill, and the growth continued, albeit slightly hindered, in September.
September to Now (mid-October)
While applying to YCombinator in September, I was connected with a previously YC funded startup called Mayhem. Ivan, one of the founders helped improve our YC application, but not only that, provided us with the concept of a "hook"; a hook is anything that draws the user in and provides instant value in return for them performing an action.
This was a much-needed strategy to continue growing since our marketing from August has mostly failed my expectations. So, we decided that we will "hook" our users in by providing them with useful class notes and other exam resources in return for inviting friends and peers.
It is here we noticed that more than 60% of our users were downloading files, which means they were inviting their friends, and the total number of invites sent out improved slightly more than 50x. This was the only reason our userbase was able to continue growing.
The Bad News
Sara, another helping hand, pointed out very quickly that this will eventually stabilize as more and more people joined the platform, and exactly that ended up happening. We also noticed that the users registered but made no attempts to create content, which we consider to be a core piece of our platform. This realization ended up resulting in the following thoughts;
- Our forum-based platform, though made information more organized and easily accessible, was perhaps a barrier to having quick and informal discussions
- The lack of mobile apps made it hard to constantly stay in touch with others on the platform
Here, we began focusing more on these two areas of ClassHill and as I write this, the platform will soon be rolling out a chat-based version of all groups and channels, and we've already rolled out apps for both Android and iOS.
Safe to say, as the sole developer in the company, who is also the founder and CEO, I've not had much of a chance to write updates on our progress and where we stand. But as I now take a break from testing our chat functionality, I can do exactly that.
With all this being said, the goals for the remainder of the year are;
- Continue with at least 10% WOW growth rate from the numbers of August (in all aspects)
- See an increase of at least 10x in the number of posts/messages created
- See an increase of higher user retention ratios (as our apps help provide more avenues to access content)
A key part of achieving these milestones will be to target the 2 universities which we have not yet focused on; York and McMaster.
There are a few key reasons for this;
- Existing students at UofT and Ryerson have already been impressioned with a forum-based platform
- They've already been bombarded with marketing, which means future marketing may prove less efficient
- We've reached a vast majority of 1st years from both of these universities, and 1st years are always our core focus
More will be said on all this sometime in December once the Fall semester finishes.
