The Economic Meltdown Meets the Tip’d Growth Curve (Or, How We Got Lucky)

When I first got the idea to create Tip’d, in late September, the market wasn’t doing well–but neither were people comparing current times to the Great Depression. No, the economy really went south just as we were entering our public beta in mid-October. I’d like to think Tip’d would have been a success regardless of its timing, but the truth is: we got lucky. We launched a web site for discussing financial news right at a time when people started increasingly discussing financial news.

Beta Launch: We Might Have Something Here!

When we went into our public beta on October 14 (yes, only 21 days after I thought of the idea), I was hoping we would get at least 100 users. I knew we wouldn’t enter the social web limelight being featured on the likes of big-reach publications like TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb–but I figured we’d at least get a post or two on some finance blogs, and hopefully new users would trickle in.

It turns out, I underestimated the credibility that having Muhammad Saleem on our team brought. We got extensive coverage on some very nice publications such as ZD Net, Mashable, The Industry Standard, and Search Engine Land. Moreover, a ton of social media vets who knew Mu from other sites (like Digg) joined up. All in all, we got over 400 user registrations and 15,000 pageviews on our first day in public beta. As the beta stage continued over the next 3 weeks, new users continued to come in and register; going into our 1.0 launch, we had nearly 2,000 members.

1.0 & Publisher Outreach: Get The Bloggers On Your Side

The day we went 1.0, we passed 2,000 members, and 25,000 Tips. I finally was able to take a deep breath and relax. When you launch a community site, your biggest fear is that after some initial buzz and user submissions, activity will die down, and you’ll run out of momentum as the tumbleweeds pass by. But we had definitely reached a point of sustainablity. Even in ‘down days’ we were getting 50+ story submissions and 25+ new user registrations.

Probably the biggest help in reaching this sustainability was all the support we got from publishers. Jim Wang from Blueprint for Financial Prosperity joined our team to head up Publisher Outreach, and did a fantastic job lining up high-traffic and high-value partners such as Get Rich Slowly, Five Cent Nickel, Consumerism Commentary, and Stop Buying Crap, to put the Tip’d button on their blog posts. This drove user registrations and story submissions, and got the Tip’d brand exposure, too.

The main reason we’re able to pick up this publisher support is because, similar to some other successful sites, we concentrate on sending users off our site, to great content. We’ve seen other social media sites link story titles to a comment thread, or worse, a framed version of the source story, to encourage pageviews or commenting on the social media site. In my opinion, this is annoying; plus, it’s robbing the original publisher of the pageviews/users/comments that it deserves.

Because we’re not afraid to send our traffic off of Tip’d, we’ve gotten feedback from publishers like:

• ‘You send more traffic than a Mixx homepage story’
• ‘Tip’d regularly makes my top 5 referring domains’

Which is exactly what we want to hear. In the last week, we’ve even seen the Tip’d button appear on ETF Trends and (soon) Kiplinger’s–two high traffic, respected publications that will regularly send a lot of activity and new users our way.

Meanwhile, as we send traffic outward, Tip’d remains sticky–our biggest source of traffic is ‘bookmark/direct hit’.

The Growth Curve & Looking Ahead

Of course, I can’t pat myself on the back without comparing Tip’d to the competition. As we enter the Age of the Aggregator, I want Tip’d to be one of the major sites casual users visit to conveniently get the best and most important financial news. To fill the ‘major aggregator’ role, we need to be competitive against sites like Clusterstock and BloggingStocks:

We still have some catching up to do, but not bad for a project we bootstrapped with our $20,000 in cash savings, right?

I’m also very interested in comparing Tip’d to other vertical social media sites–we obviously can’t compete with sites like Digg or Reddit yet, but I’d like to see us meet or surpass activity levels on successful ‘niche’ social news sites like Dzone and Kirtsy:

The verticalization of social news is, in my opinion, a macro-trend that should continue; if you want to discuss business stuff and you don’t care about Linux and Apple and tech news, I’m hoping you come to Tip’d, rather than Digg’s finance section.

Which brings me to our near-term goals. I believe that if we can continue on our growth path, we can hit:

• 25,000 registered users
• 500 story submissions per day
• 1,000+ referrals sent to the source for a homepage story
• 1M+ monthly pageviews

By mid-2009. At that point, we’ll be a heavy hitter in the finance vertical, and one of the larger ‘niche’ social news sites. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to keep things fresh by adding new features and tweaks to the site (our Facebook app and iGoogle widget are coming soon!), and Jimmy and I will continue to fund the project out of our own pockets. I owe a special thanks to the rest of the Tip’d team, and to all of our users and supporting publishers, for getting us as far as we’ve gotten. Here’s to a successful 2009… and here’s to a turbulent economy!

 
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