I recently watched a great talk by Rand over at Hackers & Founders that he titled, "Inbound Marketing for Startups" and it made me think about what is arguably the question that is on the mind of every startup founder: "How do I get my new company/website to gain traction?" If you haven't watched the presentation yet then I would encourage you to do so because Rand lays out some great actionable items that gave me a Google Doc full of notes to work through. My goal for this article though is not to re-hash some of the awesome ideas that Rand presented but rather to share some of the things that I learned when we recently launched WeightTraining.com.

Every Website's Growth Profile is Different

I have launched hundreds of different sites over the years and while you can certainly clump certain types of sites into different tranches of when the website will blossom into a traffic pattern of "full maturity"; no two sites are exactly alike.

I found out very quickly that building and marketing an involved social web app like WeightTraining.com is much different than building an easy peasy informational content only site like my car insurance website CarInsuranceComparison.com. Attracting people looking for car insurance quotes is not at all like attracting people looking to find a workout plan, log their workouts, and interact with other like-minded fitness enthusiasts.

Developing startup growth envy is an easy trap for any founder to have. When you read reports of 45% monthly growth for Pinterest it can be easy to get discouraged if your site isn't taking off quite like you had hoped it would. Learn from Pinterest and others seeing wild growth patterns, emulate some of their built in viral/social components if you can, but let them serve as an encouragement and not an excuse to slack off and get depressed.

Some of the Mistakes I Made...

If you are still depressed by Pinterest's growth ("An online bulletin board for housewives? That idea will never see any traction...") then let me share a few of the mistakes I made during the last year or so of launching and iterating on WeightTraining.com. Even if you don't learn anything from my mistakes, it should still hopefully cheer you up, right?

1. Lack of Focus: When we first launched we were kind of hazy about what we wanted to do with the site. That's not always a bad thing because sometimes it's best to just get something, anything out there to at least defeat the urge to procrastinate. We knew we wanted to build a cool fitness website with... a way to track workouts... maybe some workout plans? ... a list of exercises? Those ideas morphed into all of the fun elements that you see on the site today where the goal is to use points, leaderboards, badges, groups, challenges, goal tracking, etc. to make working out more social and more all around fun.
2. Poor Market Research: We spent a lot of development time on a section of the site that was a web app to help personal trainers manage their clients. Unfortunately, we waited until after building it out to really do some in depth market research and find out that most personal trainers weren't all that interested. Let's just say that my business partner and programming ninja John wasn't a huge fan of my lackadaisical approach to market research.
3. Inconsistent Design: I'm a big fan of pushing stuff out as quickly as possible even if aesthetically it could be better. However, there is something to be said for saving time in the long run by doing something "right" the first time and getting the design exactly how you want it. We are constantly iterating on the site which is a good thing and yet we still have a lot of the old not so great legacy design floating around on certain screens. Our new and improved user dashboard and activity stream of logged workouts looks awesome yet even our home page is still waiting to be remodeled and our workout logger is in the middle of a complete overhaul. Not the most consistent user experience.

Yeah... I'm not so big on cardio in case you haven't noticed...

I could probably list out a bunch of other mistakes that we made but let's move on to some of the things that went well, really well!

The Good Stuff

The vicious catch 22 of any site that is even remotely social is that of course the more people that are using the site the more people will enjoy it but if no one is using the site then no one wants to sign up so on and on it goes. We had to think up a bunch of different "hooks" to entice people to sign up and try out the site - and quick!

To ratchet up the pressure even more, we have an activity stream that shows when people log a workout, earn a new badge, complete a fitness challenge, start a new workout plan, etc. (if they elect in their privacy settings to make it public of course) and while all of this stuff is housed in the user dashboard (that requires a login) with different tabs for "My Activity", "Following", "Groups", etc. we also have a public activity feed which can be kind of a recklessly bold move for a new site because what if... (horror of horrors)... the most recent activity stream item is from 23 MINUTES AGO! (gasp) EVERYONE WILL THINK WE AREN'T POPULAR!

With all of this increased pressure to get new users and get them fast, here are some of the "hooks" that we came up with to entice more sign-ups and more activity on the site:

1. Fitness Report Card: Everyone has wondered at one time or another if they really are as fit/strong/healthy/etc. as they think they are. We designed an interactive tool that uses answers from some key fitness related questions and an algorithm based off of a bunch of studies to generate a "Fitness Report Card" with a percentage grade and an A-F grade both overall and in specific categories like weight, diet, cardio, flexibility, upper body strength, and lower body strength. If anyone is interested my grade is, Oh, what is it here, let me see, ah, here it is: it's an overall grade of "A" and an overall score of 96%. No biggie. (<-- See what I did there? I got a good grade so now I want to brag about it a little bit and share it with you... Mwahaha, our evil plan to take over the world by creating cool stuff that people actually want to tell others about is working even on me...mwahaha)
2. Workout Plans: Every guy wants to look like Ryan Reynolds and every girl wants their guy to look like Ryan Reynolds so for a plan like the Ryan Reynolds Workout Plan the only hook you may need to attract interest in the workout plan is simply a shot of Mr Reynold's abs. But, we want sign-ups and the Ryan Reynolds Workout is free. So, how can we make a free workout plan a hook to get people to sign up? Well, we kept the free workout plans accessible to non logged in users but we A) Prompted a sign-up/log in to be able to access the printer friendly PDF version of the workouts and B) Prompted a sign-up/login to be able to follow the workout plan and have it tie into our workout logger and automatically populate the workout logger with the correct exercises, sets, reps, send out a reminder email on the workout days the user pre-selects, etc. Success!
3. Groups: Groups are inherently viral because no one wants to be in a group all by themselves, right? Ah man... am I going to look bad and be the only person in the SEOmoz fitness group...

Hopefully you have been able to learn a little bit from both my mistakes and some of the things that we did right with our work in process website WeightTraining.com. I would love to be in the rarefied air that Pinterest is in with their growth rate but wouldn't we all! I am happy now to see consistent growth in daily sign-ups. It started at one or two new sign-ups per day, then 5 per day, then 10 per day, then 25 per day, then 50 per day, then...?

What do YOU Think?

What advice do you have for encouraging social interaction on a new website?

What kinds of different traffic growth patterns have you noticed for different sites that you own/manage?

What killer "hooks" have you used before to entice sign-ups?