How We Built and Launched PairMixer
pairmixer.comI enjoyed reading this post. The guys did pretty good job in a single weekend. However, I think it would be beneficial to do more research on female online behavior. Pinterest certainly should have been one of the first places they went to acquire users and build buzz. If there are women, the men will come. So, since women tend to be more cautious when it comes to digital dating, I would have launched in more female-oriented spaces as well as the tech world. That's just coming from a girl :)
How many users did each of those marketing channels bring you? How many total users do you have now, and what's your strategy for getting more users?
I really enjoyed this post. It's a great read on how a good, simple idea can be executed on quickly. Nice one :)
The use of Twitter's Bootstrap in particular seems to be catching on a lot. Your site looks great, Bootstrap was clearly a good choice for it.
This is an interesting story and I think the guys did a great job on PR but PR is not the end game here. How are you going to get women to sign up? And paying women to be "virtual girlfriends" doesn't count (or at least that's a different business).
It was just a weekend project.
If we were to start over again (and if it wasn't just a weekend thing), we would have make the site invitation only and keep the men to women ratio 50:50. Then grow the userbase slowly (with whichever way we could).
Overall, according to our user stats, women had no problem signing up. It's just that we launched in the tech circle with overwhelming numbers of men.
thoughts on promoting via Pinterest? They've got the female userbase, and there's tons of creative ways to design the hook.
Could you give more detail on the reverse engineering. Did you use something like WireShark?
Great little article bootstrapping the start-up. I hope to see a follow-up if the company gets traction. These article help me keep in touch with the technology that is currently being used. I was unaware of SendGrid until I read this. On a side note, I'd like to see complete solutions a la Google Mail - Send & Receive Grid.