No one cared about my startup until we gave away... breadshoes?

I'm the founder/CEO of Ratify, an upcoming app that connects citizens with politicians. I thought it would be really cool to run a contest where we gave away a meeting with the President. Turns out no one else thought it was cool! We ran the contest for 1 day and received anemic traffic and shares.

So on day 2 we added a second contest for a pair of freaking BREADSHOES, and randomly assigned new users to one of the two contests. It's only been live for a short very time (as I write this), but our conversion rate has effectively doubled, and our traffic is increasing by the minute.

(Once the contest concludes, I'll post a full report on our data.)

Morale of the story? Things go viral on the internet for no good reason, so maybe you should add some "no good reason" to your product.

Here's the link to the contest: http://www.ratifyapp.com/contest

Thanks for listening to me!