Behind-the-scenes stats from our first month
We love when startups pull back the curtain to reveal how things are really going. Slick PR can make a site seem bigger-than-life. But numbers don’t lie. Sure, you got covered on Lifehacker, but how many traffic and users did that really amount to?
Read on to find out. But first a little back story.
From February to August of this year Matt and I built Apps & Oranges in our free time. We put up a landing page with a request invite form. We did zero outreach, except this: in June I sent one unsolicited email to The Next Web to tell them we were starting Beta soon.
Our pre-beta signup list: a whopping 60 people. Mostly our friends. But two of those 60 were from the Next Web.
August 30: Launch, invites sent to the 60
- Unique visitors: 260
- Pageviews: 2,421
- Signups: 33
September 2: The Next Web story
- Unique visitors: 1,758
- Pageviews: 12,414
- Signups: 71 (we gave them 100 invites)
Septempber 7: Lifehacker story!
- Unique visitors: 9,508
- Pageviews: 90,951
- Signups: 2031 (we gave them 3000 invites, at their request)
Interesting side note: Technorati ranks The Next Web higher than Lifehacker, but Lifehacker sent us over 5x the traffic.
Other Interesting Facts
- From the Lifehacker story until the end of the September we maintained about 1000 unique visitors and 5000 pageviews per day.
- Traffic from Google grew from nothing at launch to 65% on Sep 30.
- About 60% of people who request an invite sign up when they get one.
A Sweet Start
Given our tiny starting list and non-existent marketing efforts, we’re thrilled with these numbers. The response to the site has been overwhelmingly positive. Thanks for an awesome first month. We’re just getting started.
Get In Immediately
To celebrate our first month we’ve got 1000 invites that we’ll send out immediately. Get yours here.
Private Beta Starts Today
We’re excited that Apps & Oranges is now live and invite-only beta testing has started. If you didn’t get in on the first round of beta, you can sign up for the next round on the site. Click “Request Invite” in the upper right.
Sneak peak.
Finding apps on purpose
The sea of apps is growing more vast and it’s become clear we need help finding our way. Everywhere you look new app-discovery tools like Chomp and AppsFire are popping up. Even Google and Yahoo are getting in the action with app search engines.
We noticed a couple interesting things about this new frontier of app-discovery.
First, almost everyone is focused on the mobile space, on iOS and Android apps. That’s understandable, mobile growth is staggering. But what about the rest of the computing universe? There’s a world of web, mac and even (gasp) windows apps out there that need a place to be discovered.
Second, many services like AppsFire are taking the “What’s Hot” approach to apps. It’s great for randomly discovering neat new apps. But sometimes you’re looking for an app to accomplish something specific. Maybe you need a guitar tuner or a gps app—maybe it’s something boring like a web app for project management or accounting. Googling ”what are the best apps for doing X” usually returns a slew of blog posts, some which can be several years old. We knew there had to be a better way to find and compare great apps. And Apps & Oranges was born.
