Before I start, let me show you the before and after picture of our Google Analytics.

January Traffic (~1k)

Feburary Traffic (~35k)

I think our most important marketing decision was made early in the development phase. From the beginning, we knew we had zero marketing budget. The product had to be spread by word of mouth. Almost every design decision was made around that assumption.

The key to creating a viral product is to minimize friction.

We were obsessed with reducing friction. Our swf runtime was optimized from 1mb to 750k to 450k, smaller than a photograph. We used Flash Pixel Bender wherever we can to boost performance. But most importantly, we eliminated the need for user accounts and photo uploads, so people can just open a photo from disk and start editing in seconds.

Everything in our application was designed to get people up and and using Citrify quickly, so they can fully experience the software and tell their friends.

To backup our claim with data, here is our traffic source stats.

Traffic Sources

We were very pleased with the volume of direct traffic, because most direct traffic comes from word of mouth sources, such as email, twitter feeds, or just good old office water coolers.

You will also notice that we were not covered by any A-list tech blogs. As much as we would love to get covered by TechCrunch, we simply don’t have the time to reach out and follow up with various journalists. Instead, we made it easy for smaller blogs to cover us, starting by giving away premium licenses to bloggers, which you can check out here. We also created a FAQ page just for bloggers, which is available here. The small blogs brought in large percentage of our traffic, and it required little effort on our part to generate. However, due to the low authority of these blogs, they did not boost our page rank by very much.

Tali and I are by no means marketing experts. We had limited resource, so our attack vector was to build a high quality and low friction product. We posted our data here in hopes that it would help other startups. In the coming months, we have a few small marketing experiments in the works, and will share that data as it becomes available.

Cheers,

Zee

For those who don’t know the back story, Tali and I met in Ottawa almost three years ago. At the time, I just finished my software engineering degree from University of Ottawa, and Tali was doing her masters in history.

Fast forward to 2009, we moved back to Ottawa, and the job market was bleak as ever. That’s when we decided to take a hard look at our collective skills, and took the leap of faith into entrepreneurship.

The math nerd in me has always had a strong interest in image processing. Building photo filters in Flash and Pixel Bender was my favorite pass-time. Tali has worked in photography studios and marketing. So naturally, we decided to use my toy filters to build a photo editing product, and Tali would do the marketing work.

It was easier said than done.

Lesson 1: Less features at higher quality

After several months of long night coding sessions, we had a basic product with WYSIWYG photo touchup, effects, undo/redo, and zoom/pan. Our November 1st beta deadline was fast approaching, and we only had little more than half the features we planned for. As we added new features, the number of bugs grew. Finally we took a long hard look at our wish list and started chopping things away aggressively.

Soon the build quality was stabilized and we launched the beta on December 5. None of our beta testers hinted that we lacked features. Instead, they were more interested in the usability and feature quality. Lesson learned: we should add new features judiciously with greater emphasis on quality.

Lesson 2: Give before you take

To say Citrify was launched with little fanfare was an understatement. We both spent five days, emailing nearly 80 bloggers and only two of them covered our launch. It was definitely a low-point for us. Were our emails too long? Too short? Does our product suck? Were we offering too much? Too little? The questions were endless.

We looked at other micro-startups, such as Balsamiq, and we noticed a common trend: they gave back to the community before they were rewarded for their effort. We changed our marketing strategy. Instead of trying to get people to pay attention to us, our new goal was to give away as many licenses as possible. We created a special promo page for bloggers, journalists, non-profits, also offered promo codes that people can give away to their readers and user groups. It has only been three weeks, and we have given away over $10,000 worth of licenses. It resulted in blog coverages and tweets but didn’t cost us a penny. In the coming year, we will no-doubt continue this strategy to build our brand awareness.

Our promo page

Lesson 3: Be clear about the target audience

When we started product development, we knew it was going to be a cool product, but we didn’t really think about who we could sell it to. Our sales strategy: Adwords. Finish the product and Adwords it.

After our launch, we tried advertising on Adwords, Stumple-upon, and Facebook, none of which was cost effective. Even if we optimized the ads and adjusted the price, online ads was still not sustainable as the sole sales channel. We were stuck. That’s when we realized that we had to look at our target audience more closely, and target segments such as new mothers and scrapbookers. We are also looking more closely into B2B leads, where we can white label our product and integrate into third-party sites. Our only regret was not going through the effort of analyzing our prospective customers more carefully and target them accordingly from early on, saving time and energy. But we realized that these set-backs were all part of the learning process, and will help us refine our strategy in the future.

At the risk of sounding cliched, I have to say that the launch of Citrify in 2009 was a roller coaster ride for us. But I bet it’s just a prequel to what’s in store for us. Citrify has only been launched for a few weeks. We still have zero revenue. However, we are excited about our current leads and have high hopes for the consumer side. Please stay tuned to our blogs and twitter feed for the lately updates.

Regards,
Zee