I was just realizing that BigStartups.com has now been live for a little over three months now. The site has been developing very quickly, and it's been a promising start to the grand vision of creating the top online resource for the startup community.
Startup companies, entrepreneurs and others have been joining at an increasing pace, and it appears we will pass the 2,000 member mark within the next couple days. While 2k might not seem like a huge number in absolute terms, but the initial rate of growth has been much faster than a previous sites I built like ActiveRain, which went on to become the largest online community in the real estate space.
Traffic to the site has been rapidly increasing too. Here's the the traffic chart from Compete through the end of December. So, far we traffic in January has been 50% higher according to our logs.
A local startup community Seattle2.0 maintains a Startup Index based off of several different traffic metrics and we have continued to climb on that, currently at #69 for Seattle based startups through Dec.
More importantly there has been increasing interaction and activity throughout the site. The Questions and Answer's section is becoming more active with each passing day. We are also beginning to see a lot of quality startup related content added to the blog posts and news sections of the site. The amount of content in these area's should increase dramatically with some new features that are in the works (blog syndication).
I continued to make changes on a very frequent basis to keep improving the underlying platform. For example I changed the blog section of the site to add voting and post ranking similar to the news section earlier today. This will help the members "bubble" the top content up for others to see. Many of the changes have been made based off of member feedback and suggestions. So, always let us know what you think, or if you see something that could be improved.
Sorry, if this sounds like a toot your own horn kind of post but I get really excited to see a project starting to take off :) Especially one that went from conception to launch in under a month and has grown organically with zero advertising spend or major PR push (yet).
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Taobao, what browser and version are you using? I'll see if I can track down the issue. | |
Posted by Matt Heaton on Jan, 21 at 10:51 PM
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I tried with Firefox v3.5.7 and Internet Explorer 8 and Chrome on PC and Safari on Mac.. displays blank page in popup. I thought the problem of antivirus.. kaspersky.. tried turn it off and still doesn't work.. |
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Posted by Taobao FOCUS on Jan, 21 at 10:54 PM
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Webpage error details User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0)
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Posted by Taobao FOCUS on Jan, 21 at 10:58 PM
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Congrats and I am Home View, our little real estate video and photography company, is happy to be a part of the experience. | |
Posted by Home View on Jan, 21 at 11:09 PM
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I will be following your progress, very exciting. | |
Posted by iliketotallyloveit on Jan, 21 at 11:31 PM
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Terrific... How can some of that success rub off on us?! My small business video production company can surely use the boost!!! | |
Posted by SBV Productions on Jan, 21 at 11:32 PM
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Nice congratulations on the initial growth, i hope it continues :) | |
Posted by The Lost Agency on Jan, 22 at 12:10 AM
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Good news, keep up the good work! | |
Posted by favit on Jan, 22 at 12:26 AM
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Congrats! Any chance you can share some tips on how you have promoted / grown traffic? Thanks! Ben http://www.bmvclassifieds.com - Quality classifieds at below market value prices. |
Posted by ben on Jan, 22 at 1:04 AM
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Congratulations, I must admit this is one of the only on-line communities that we have ever contributed too the way we have, we look forward to future developments. | |
Posted by Contextured on Jan, 22 at 1:35 AM
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That's great growth. Anything to share on marketing approach ?
Cheers AJ http://totkare.com |
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Posted by Alok Jain on Jan, 22 at 4:20 AM
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Matt, That is impressive. A lot of us would like to know how you got such massive amount of traffic. I was able to get my site into the Google top 10 search results for it's keywords within 2 weeks out of 6 million search results. Try googling: Divorce Support Club for men, Divorce Support Club men, Divorce Support Men, Divorce support club I now have positioning but would like to know your secrets on sparking up the massive traffic Thanks, Toby
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Posted by exwifegothalf.com on Jan, 22 at 8:25 AM
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This site has alot to offer the entrepreneurial community. Look forward to your continued success. I would also like to know your optimization strategies. Best of Luck, Sandy (Custombabyshoegirl) Kids N Caboodle.com |
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Posted by kids n caboodle.com on Jan, 22 at 9:39 AM
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great progress but I am surprised more are not particpating in the questions section. | |
Posted by ZippyCart.com on Jan, 24 at 9:52 AM
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Awesome work! This is only the beginning trust me :) I am too interested in your optimization strategies. This is quite impressive growth. |
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Posted by Muttr.com - Just Vent! on Jan, 24 at 12:08 PM
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A couple people asked about the strategies we've used to drive members and traffic. As far as members they've come basically from 3 sources. 1. Directly contacting startups and entrepreneurs, in person, phone and email. 2. Social media and posts in other startup related communities. 3. Members referring or inviting others to join BigStartups Traffic is mainly coming from: 1. Returning members, coming back to the site every couple of days 2. Links to content posted on BigStartups via social media (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc) 3. Search engines. We're just now starting to see an uptick in visits from search engines, currently about 100 per day. We haven't yet done any major external (link building) SEO work and a big part of SEO is just time as it often takes several months to see results from SEO work you do. |
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Posted by Matt Heaton on Jan, 24 at 12:57 PM
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What about some banners or badges that startups can put on their site saying that they are on bigstartups.com? I didn't see anything like that on the site. | |
Posted by ZippyCart.com on Jan, 24 at 1:40 PM
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Congrats Bigstartups.com. This looks like it has the potential to really take off! | |
Posted by Spiceworks on Jan, 24 at 9:36 PM
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http://www.bigstartups.com
congratulations!
That sounds quite good.
by the way, could you tell me why I can edit HTML in blog post.. it seems the script doesnt work.. Could you tell me how to fix it.
Thanks
Taobaofocus.com