Flush with $750,000 Atthepool.com is crushing it w/1000's of daily emails to build the next Meetup.com
Today we chat with a startup team based in Santa Monica. David and Alex from At The Pool tell us how they're building a social network to help get you offline.
At the pool is a social network, and you can join using your facebook connect profile. You join pools that are of interest to you, things you love, hobbes, etc, and everyday the site will send you an introduction email to someone else who shares your interest. It helps connect you with people in your area. (We love their quote: “Technology brought us online. Isn’t it time it took us off?”)
2:40 Alex talks about their daily emails, AP split testing, and their tremendous amount of thinking behind the project. You’ll definitely learn a lot from this video. We hear a lot about email marketing and AP split testing details, but in this video we get more detail from these talented founders. Their team consists of four people, and are a great example of product driving the business.
5:16 If you’re a small startup, and you want to see how a small team markets themselves, this interview with Alex and David will be very helpful.
6:18 They launched the product about 7 or 8 months ago, with members in over 90 countries. The point of At the Pool is to help you to meet new people based on your interests. The idea was found originally a year before the launch of the site. They felt it was hard to find people in the community who shared interests, and wanted to build something that incorporated locality with interests.
8:32 They want this to be something grow organically, not forced. It’s a really easy icebreaker for meeting people and building your network.
10:11 From a bizdev perspective, is David reaching out to other businesses with large pools of people? They’re pretty well connected in the startup culture down in LA and in San Francisco as w ell. They’ve also been looking into different subgroups, and have been releasing a large variety of exciting pools.
11:06 Are the pools restricted to what the team creates? There is a page on the site where people can recommend pools, and the team puts up about 10 new pools a week. Meetup really becomes an event platform, while at the pool focuses more on interest and hobbes. Getting a tech press early on has been a big driver for the team in terms of business development, and they saw a big boost of users following it.
14:08 What has the team learned about the press? How do they keep their audience growing? The first thing they learned was as soon as one person wrote about them, everyone else would say it was old news and wouldn’t want to cover it. Tell them beforehand to hold your article and give them a certain publication time. The embargo helps navigate people posting it early and helps keep press happier.
15:50 They had really good growth after the first Kenny Creek Capitol, and a bunch of angels. ??? Go back and fix this part.
17:40 When they raised capital, they focused on their trajectory. They were expanding multiple countries, user bases, and across the board everything was looking good. What’s their strategy for the Android market? Once a design is finalized, it should be easier. If the Iphone market takes off, then they think it’s worth to develop it for Android.
They have a matching algorithm that’s pretty smart, that picks the matches for the daily emails. Not all the emails are reciprocal, but they’re working on it. These emails bring back a lot of their users and viewers.
People are easily influenced by different pictures, so their team is trying to make their site as visually interesting as possible. They host events all the time, and try to make it feel really personal and less corporate.
What kind of autoresponder sequences are the team using? They have a lot of stuff built onto the site, but don’t use any off the shelf software. They looked into doing an auto retweet function, but thought it sounded like spam.
29:41 What do they do with their AB testing data?
30:20 Amul says that the team is 80% email marketing geniuses, 20% product creation geniuses.
31:00 Here we take a view into the website, including the signup experience.
32:16 Is At the Pool getting a lot of new people from traffic driving campaigns?
33:10 Let’s see our “match of the day” and learn more on how these matches are selected.
34:05 Jeff’s At the Pool profile is pulled up. We can see the completeness level of the profile. Alex says over 90% of their members have profiles that are over 75% complete.
35:40 What elements do they use to really pull up matches for people? They tell us that pools and location filters trump all else when it comes to matching users up.
36:50 They worked on this product three or four months before the launch, and then tried to work on it, and update the product daily.
38:58 The team definitely plans to have their ETA for mobile out by September first, and are hoping to have it out sooner.
39:48 They’re designing their mobile site to not need any other network; they want to build their own platform for mobile and eventually web based that doesn’t sit on anything else. 43:10 One out of the four viewers visit the site on a daily basis. When they launch their mobile version, they’ll be able to control the process more because of the increased data.
We move into the topic of monetization.
43:55 The team is currently not monetizing right now, because they’re focused more on the engagement and growth of their product. They’re somewhat following what Google did, which was saving the monetization until after they had a large and committed user base.
44:47 Alex talks about an example of a monetization strategy they would use when they begin that process.
So how is this team so successful in building such an attractive and well functioning product?
46:26 As Amul says, what’s their “secret sauce”?
48:30 Alex talks more about his background here. He grew up in upstate New York, and dropped out of high school, going on to pursue much more engineering opportunities and experiences.
52:26 At the Pool wants to implement advertisements in the future that won’t hinder the experience of their users. They definitely want things that the users would find interesting or relevant.
53:17 What made them decide to add religious pools?
55:23 What were some of the team’s early struggles? One error they made was trying to fund-raise before they had polished and really focused a lot on the product. They decided to put the fundraising off and really just work on the product itself, which ended up attracted much more support and success.
We really enjoyed this interview with At the Pool today. There’s a lot we learned from these two about smart marketing strategies and conceptual thoughts behind the development of their product, and we hope you will too.
At The Pool http://atthepool.com/
At the pool is a social network, and you can join using your facebook connect profile. You join pools that are of interest to you, things you love, hobbes, etc, and everyday the site will send you an introduction email to someone else who shares your interest. It helps connect you with people in your area. (We love their quote: “Technology brought us online. Isn’t it time it took us off?”)
2:40 Alex talks about their daily emails, AP split testing, and their tremendous amount of thinking behind the project. You’ll definitely learn a lot from this video. We hear a lot about email marketing and AP split testing details, but in this video we get more detail from these talented founders. Their team consists of four people, and are a great example of product driving the business.
5:16 If you’re a small startup, and you want to see how a small team markets themselves, this interview with Alex and David will be very helpful.
6:18 They launched the product about 7 or 8 months ago, with members in over 90 countries. The point of At the Pool is to help you to meet new people based on your interests. The idea was found originally a year before the launch of the site. They felt it was hard to find people in the community who shared interests, and wanted to build something that incorporated locality with interests.
8:32 They want this to be something grow organically, not forced. It’s a really easy icebreaker for meeting people and building your network.
10:11 From a bizdev perspective, is David reaching out to other businesses with large pools of people? They’re pretty well connected in the startup culture down in LA and in San Francisco as w ell. They’ve also been looking into different subgroups, and have been releasing a large variety of exciting pools.
11:06 Are the pools restricted to what the team creates? There is a page on the site where people can recommend pools, and the team puts up about 10 new pools a week. Meetup really becomes an event platform, while at the pool focuses more on interest and hobbes. Getting a tech press early on has been a big driver for the team in terms of business development, and they saw a big boost of users following it.
14:08 What has the team learned about the press? How do they keep their audience growing? The first thing they learned was as soon as one person wrote about them, everyone else would say it was old news and wouldn’t want to cover it. Tell them beforehand to hold your article and give them a certain publication time. The embargo helps navigate people posting it early and helps keep press happier.
15:50 They had really good growth after the first Kenny Creek Capitol, and a bunch of angels. ??? Go back and fix this part.
17:40 When they raised capital, they focused on their trajectory. They were expanding multiple countries, user bases, and across the board everything was looking good. What’s their strategy for the Android market? Once a design is finalized, it should be easier. If the Iphone market takes off, then they think it’s worth to develop it for Android.
They have a matching algorithm that’s pretty smart, that picks the matches for the daily emails. Not all the emails are reciprocal, but they’re working on it. These emails bring back a lot of their users and viewers.
People are easily influenced by different pictures, so their team is trying to make their site as visually interesting as possible. They host events all the time, and try to make it feel really personal and less corporate.
What kind of autoresponder sequences are the team using? They have a lot of stuff built onto the site, but don’t use any off the shelf software. They looked into doing an auto retweet function, but thought it sounded like spam.
29:41 What do they do with their AB testing data?
30:20 Amul says that the team is 80% email marketing geniuses, 20% product creation geniuses.
31:00 Here we take a view into the website, including the signup experience.
32:16 Is At the Pool getting a lot of new people from traffic driving campaigns?
33:10 Let’s see our “match of the day” and learn more on how these matches are selected.
34:05 Jeff’s At the Pool profile is pulled up. We can see the completeness level of the profile. Alex says over 90% of their members have profiles that are over 75% complete.
35:40 What elements do they use to really pull up matches for people? They tell us that pools and location filters trump all else when it comes to matching users up.
36:50 They worked on this product three or four months before the launch, and then tried to work on it, and update the product daily.
38:58 The team definitely plans to have their ETA for mobile out by September first, and are hoping to have it out sooner.
39:48 They’re designing their mobile site to not need any other network; they want to build their own platform for mobile and eventually web based that doesn’t sit on anything else. 43:10 One out of the four viewers visit the site on a daily basis. When they launch their mobile version, they’ll be able to control the process more because of the increased data.
We move into the topic of monetization.
43:55 The team is currently not monetizing right now, because they’re focused more on the engagement and growth of their product. They’re somewhat following what Google did, which was saving the monetization until after they had a large and committed user base.
44:47 Alex talks about an example of a monetization strategy they would use when they begin that process.
So how is this team so successful in building such an attractive and well functioning product?
46:26 As Amul says, what’s their “secret sauce”?
48:30 Alex talks more about his background here. He grew up in upstate New York, and dropped out of high school, going on to pursue much more engineering opportunities and experiences.
52:26 At the Pool wants to implement advertisements in the future that won’t hinder the experience of their users. They definitely want things that the users would find interesting or relevant.
53:17 What made them decide to add religious pools?
55:23 What were some of the team’s early struggles? One error they made was trying to fund-raise before they had polished and really focused a lot on the product. They decided to put the fundraising off and really just work on the product itself, which ended up attracted much more support and success.
We really enjoyed this interview with At the Pool today. There’s a lot we learned from these two about smart marketing strategies and conceptual thoughts behind the development of their product, and we hope you will too.
At The Pool http://atthepool.com/