I posted our URL to Reddit, that is.

After 3 private releases, we launched EditGrid’s Public Beta 1 on 7th April. Our marketing strategy then was to “leak” it to those who just might be interested. We used Technorati to search for some relevant blogs and asked the blog owner to take a look at EditGrid by posting a comment. This is when Omar wrote the first review on EditGrid in the whole blogosphere.

On 21st April, we launched EditGrid Public Beta 2. We have longed for sharing EditGrid onto our favourite sites with a wider audience. We would probably have done it one more release later — but then I saw a good opportunity to do this a bit earlier, probably too good to let it pass by.

I read a post at Reddit titled “The Top “Web 2.0″ Startups: You Decide (Paul Graham)” on 24th April calling for voting of the most admired Web 2.0 startup at a subreddit. At that time, there were less than 25 companies posted. By natural instinct, I immediately posted EditGrid to there. Indeed I was probably too excited by the posting — I even got the URL wrong! Fortunately the beauty of Web 2.0 bailed us out this time — almost immediately after my post and before I realised the error, another redditer, konrad_ has already re-posted our site with the URL corrected. So I simply deleted my entry and gave my vote to konrad_’s post.

Thanks to early mover advantage, our post stayed on the first page of web2.reddit.com for about a day and it has generated a small avalanche effect. During this short period of time, our site was spread to del.icio.us, Emily Chang’s eHub, StumbleUpon.com, diggdot.us, popurls.com, weblinks.ru, bloglines.com, netvibes.com, www.szanalmas.hu, etc..

Within 3 days, we have attracted ~5,000 unique visitors, ~20 blog mentions and ~300 new users. The result may be far from impressive, but to us it is a pretty encouraging first step.

Here, we would like to sincerely thank:

• Reddit for such an excellent product launch platform.
• konrad_ (a redditer) for correcting the link for us.
• Users who helped spreading EditGrid to other sites.
• Omar for his 1st and 2nd review.
• Saul Weiner for his encouraging blog post and all other bloggers who mentioned us.
• Last but definitely not least, users who tried EditGrid and gave us comments.

We promise a better and better EditGrid! You make us work a lot harder.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.