Ej guys, where are we going ?

We're going to see the Golden Gate bridge.

Drinnggg.

What ?

Not what, Why.

Why Why ?

We are going to Why Combinator ?

But isn't it Y not Why ?

It's top secret, that's why Why is Y.

Te pa pejmo čuj.

DoubleRecall project by CodeArtists team has been selected among the finalists in Start:Up Slovenia event.

We are happy to be acknowledged as a part of the Slovenian StartUp spirit. We are falling and getting back on our feet every day while learning the twists of being young enterpreneurs and we are tying to hack the market with some fresh approaches while getting stronger and smarter every day. If you feel the desire breathe with us, please let us know.

Pay a visit to Start:Up official announcement page to learn more (in Slovenian).

We hope you liked our popify.me coupon on the way here :D

CodeArtists team was invited today, to discuss DoubleRecall in an interview at Y Combinator. This is a rare ocasion for Slovenian StartUp company and we're all very proud for this achievement. We know it's only a first step for us, but we choose to go. There are hundreds, if not thousands of applicants and our team was selected among few other most promising teams from all over the world.

Y Combinator is a seed-stage startup funding firm based in Silicon Valley.

My name is R. Yesterday we let popify.me into the wild (read more) and here is a follow-up on how it survived through its first night.

The Story

This gets pretty Flintstonish sometimes, so beware:

Yesterday, we finished the most basic version of popify.me . We thought that HN would be a nice place to tell people about the service, so we did.

Show HN: measure curiosity of your website users

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2414491

First, we tried to find a headline that would stick at least an hour on new section, for some high karma people to see it and upvote it a bit.

But here comes the first Flintstone, me, trying to post news with a dead HN account! I didn't even know it's dead and I'm a daily HN reader for about 170 days now. I was just ok with my karma of 1 and didn't read the rules of the game, because I see myself as a pretty polite person everywhere I move. I could blame it on pg, because I remember posting a comment twice in a row one day, as HN get pretty unresponsive sometimes, but I won't, because he's a superhuman anyways and I should know the rules if I'm playing the game.

So I asked Miha to clone the dead post and we were back in the game. We also asked a favor from Sahil of GumRoad, Franz of Facesearch & Swizec of HipsterVision to upvote our post. A nice debate also fired in the discuss section. Some questions started to appear and, guess what: Miha set his noprocrast to like 4 hours, so he was locked out of HN and couldn't respond to questions.

Matevz came to rescue and Rok and Robi also poked around a bit with a large trout.

So, with a nice discussion going on, we even managed to land on the first page of HN and stayed there for like 6 hours. It was a nice adrenaline rush for the whole team and we learned a lot.

There were around 2000 unique visitors from HN and we got some positive Twitter coverage.

Feedback

We had these feedback tools at our hand:

• GetClicky for realtime tracking of the visitors (we liked the Spy World view and dots popping up in Tasmania)
• Olark for LIVE chat support on edit page
• simple feedback box in Edit Coupon page and
• invaluable HN discuss section

Lessons

The analytics and A/B Testing Results

Our goal was to try to get as many people as possible to try out our coupons and spread them on Twitter/FB and, of course, put them on their web sites. Or at least try to create some. But we also wanted to learn if people were prepared to pay for such a service.

We used

• Google Analytics for postprocessing of results and
• Optimizely for A/B testing

Results

This was the first page

Variation 1

We had a variation that tried to communicate extraordinary results we were getting in our test runs on some news publishing websites. If you are a geek of any sort, if I say you'll get 3.5% of CTR or a 8% e-mail newsletter subscription rate, you should be standing and screaming already. We didn't lie about the results, but it didn't make such a big effect as we would think. Less than 2% of visitors engaged. But there was a price tag, which could you basically reduce or remove by just retweeting coupons. It didn't matter. A price tag is a price tag.

Variation 2

This variation explained for every target group:

• business
• webmaster
• party animal

for what they should use popify.me. But it was 1 click away and only 1% of visitors clicked on it.

Variation 3

We dumped the big sign about juicy coupons and told the story behind popify.me. Out of all with a price tag, this one was the most successful.

Variation 4

was basically a Variation 1 but with no price tag. It had the 6% engagement rate. The highest of all.

Conclusion & Your suggestions

We expected a lot more engagement from 2000 users. There were around 50 coupons created and 5 embedded on the web sites. We got a lot of LIVE support and HN discuss questions about possible use cases for popify.me, so obviously we didn't communicate this good enough.

The price tag was also a big limitation. We'll drop that, because we don't have any expense with the site as we are using HipHop standalone server and Redis and can serve a gazillions of coupons with a load of 0.1.

The story reflected good and it seemed that if the visitors get the point they are more likely to engage more. We'll of course have to work more on our story-telling abilities, but that's fun stuff anyway.

What would be your thoughts on how to introduce and explain popify.me for people to pick it up faster? Please leave a comment || e-mail rkr[fat_at]doublerecall.com

Plan

Since we think that telling the story is the best way to go, we'll loose the big juicy sign and make 4-5 stories for different verticals to see which ones users like the most. We still have a constant influx of visitors from other sources than HN and I hope that this follow-up generates some more buzz. I'll follow-up :)

Cheers to our Bay Area team and Paris scouts from Polka Boogie Woogie R3 office in Technopolis. Hold your fingers crossed for our DoubleRecall/mmatcher to be accepted to this Y Combinator batch tonight.

Today we let popify.me in to the wild. We believe it's a nice simple web app, but to be sure, it should survive the first night in the woods.

So, how did we come to the idea in the first place?

When developing a new advertising format, our team did a lot of data-mining and A/B testing to reveal unknown patterns in human behaviour. One of the patterns discovered was that, if you put random badges on the edge of the screen, people tend to click on them purely out of curiosity. If you put more coupons, they’ll click even more. And if you show them coupons only once in a while, the time pressure comes into play and users also click more.

The resulting CTRs were dwarfing any other means of advertising. But beware, this behaviour only lasted as long as there were good deals hidden under the coupon badges. Changing good deals to no deals would decrease coupon CTR on the whole site for weeks to come.

With promising CTR results, we wanted even more milk from the coupons, so we implemented a form for collecting emails for the purposes of newsletter subscriptions. The number of collected emails has again exceeded all expectations of our client. And, as if this is not enough good news from our tingling little coupons, niche and local websites are also reporting good physical conversion, meaning: people showing up in the stores with printed coupons.

So what is happening here?

A lot of curiosity and a big pull. Coupon badges basically generate a pull relationship with a customer, who is then more inclined to engage with the content of the coupon.

Since all this sounds like a mouthful and we can’t tell you exact statistics or our whole case studies, we present to you: popify.me

popify.me is the simplest version of coupons that you can test on your site and see it for yourself. You’ll prepare a coupon and put it on your site in just a minute. There’s also a viral loop included to increase social media spreading and some sweet statistics to top it off.