HN Explorer

How fab.com gained 20,000 pre-launch signups in 10 days

43 points by betashop ↗ HN
How fab.com gained 20,000 pre-launch signups in 10 days (without any TC or HN stories)

We studied launchrock and other such viral invite engines, but decided to build our own.

We built a simple landing page at http://fab.com which contains pretty imagery of the types of products that will be on our site, with only 1 simple sentence explaining what we'll do, and only 1 call to action: request an invite.

Once user requests an invite, we introduce them to our viral invite process for "priority access." Priority Access (first allowed in once we open the doors) is based on number of friends invited, PLUS we created 4 levels of priority access, rewarding people who invite more friends with actual cash credits towards future use of the site.

We built in simple shares for Twitter and Facebook, as well as gmail, ymail, AOL, hotmail, bulk invites.

We started off with our own employees' contacts and then purchased a small amount of highly targeted FB ads to people in our target demo.

We A/B tested several variants of the site, including placement of open boxes for users to enter email addresses manually vs. prompting them to invite from their address books and FB/twitter (address books far outperformed).

FYI. So far, more than 20k people have signed up pre-launch and of the thousands they've invited by email, 16k have yet to signup.

FYI 2. More than 2000 signups have invited more than 5 people each.

FYI 3. So far the top sources of new users are: 1. User-to-user email invites 2. Facebook Shares 3. Twitter tweets

FB and Twitter are just about even though in terms of resulting in signups.

21 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 59.2 ms ] thread
mg1313
Good luck and have even more sign ups.
PetoVera_Matt
Nice work guys, and thanks for posting the results and what you've learned.
physcab
how much traffic did you get before the new landing page?
betashop
No significant traffic before the new landing page.
physcab
wow thats cool. can you put your email in your profile? i have a couple extra questions if you don't mind
betashop
done. jason@fab.com too if you don't find it there.
betashop
Some more interesting data here. 12% of subscribers invite their email contacts, and on average they invite more than 10 people each.
Rhodee
Congrats. How long did you have the old design up before the revamp (and success)?
betashop
Hi. This has all developed in the past 10 days.
betashop
Prior to that, fab.com was an entirely different business/website with marginal traffic. The numbers below are of new users only.
rrhoover
Thanks for the data, Jason. It continues to surprise me how many people primarily use email to invite their friends. I remember reading an article from AddThis (or maybe it was ShareThis) reporting that email also dominated as the most used channel.

(Sorry, I couldn't find the original source)

rrhoover
What was the CPC and CPA (i.e. cost per registration) with your Facebook advertising?
betashop
Hi. We've experimented with more than 300 different ad variations and targets on Facebook. We've achieved best-case $1.5/subscriber and we accepted ads that achieved $3.5 or less per subscriber. We eliminated more than 290 ads that did not achieve our 1.5 to 3.5 / acquisition goal.

We found that the factors that mattered most for achieving our ad goals on facebook were: 1. Targeting to users with specific likes/interests. 2. The imagery in the ads

FYI. Google ads have achieved best-case $7/subscriber so we stopped using them.

sawyer
Wow, can you share any more information about the successful versus unsuccessful ads? Creating 300 ads seems like an awfully large time investment.
sadiq
Adsense, adwords or both?
mista
Can you please explain how your cash credits will work: What's the dollar amount for each credit? How much initial investment did you put into this account to fund the cash credits? Moving forward, will your profits cover all the cash credits and/or will it be covered from your own pockets?

Thank you.

suitcase
Hey Jason,

I remember your name from back when you were working in the employment industry (I worked for a competitor back then.) Glad to see you have a new concept and it's starting off well.

Thanks for sharing what you've learned so far.

notahacker
Did you directly invite your old userbase? If so, any idea what percentage converted and what number of new people they invited?
betashop
We are directly inviting our old userbase but those numbers are not included here.
dlsay
Nice work, and thank you for sharing! Design execution is excellent, hope you dont mind if i borrow some ideas. The cash incentive is a nice touch to reward your champions.