allmyprofiles.com Case Study: The Most Effortful Blog Post Ever?—?or: When a VC Creates a Side Project

Long Story Short:

The realization of your own side project has many advantages, as I described in my last blog post.

With www.allmyprofiles.com, I executed a side project as a case study to show everyone that it really can be done if only you want it.

After a investing few weekends in implementing it, in the following I’ll offer insight into the entire development process.

Full Story:

In my previous blog post, I described how a side project of one’s own can help anybody thinking of founding or wanting to gain hands-on experience with executing web projects.

But nothing is more useful than a practical example. Therefore I won’t stop at theory and instead lead with a hopefully inspiring example. Yes, I put in the effort to carry out my own side project as a case study. Yes, even as a VC.

In the following, I’ll describe how it came about and got implemented, and I hope that through this I can motivate some of you to finally start their own little project.

Brainstorming

To start out we need an idea. :)

The requirements I set for my idea were:

• A first MVP must be quick and easy to execute.
• It has to be a topic that I personally find exciting and that has relevance for me as a VC (ideally with direct synergies with my main job).
• It has to solve a problem that I can relate to.
• It has to be very easy to win the first users for the service.

Personally, I’m someone who rather has too many than too few ideas so it didn’t take long for me to find the idea for my case study project:

Since Digital Media is part of Bauer Venture Partners’ focus, a lot of my time is spent thinking about and engaging with Social Media. One aspect that’s captured my interest for some time is Influencer Marketing. For a while now I’ve tried to keep up to date with developments in this area, looking closely at how influencers present themselves, act, and use their reach on social media (esp. Instagram and Snapchat).

Observing this, especially after Snapchat grew more and more popular, the following things stood out to me:

1. Successful influencers usually use multiple platforms (Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, Facebook, etc.).
2. It’s important to them to call their followers’ attention in one social network to their respective other social network profiles.
3. The networks only offer inadequate means for influencers to point their followers to their other social media profiles. Of course the social networks have little interest in this.

What these three points lead to can best be shown by the following example:

Instagram is full of profile descriptions by influencers that are crowded with URLs of the user’s various social media profiles.

On Instagram, for example, there’s only the possibility of entering one true link that can be clicked directly. For influencers this means the perpetual question of which URL to link there: their Facebook profile, their Youtube profile, their blog, or…?

Their other profile URLs, as the example shows, then often land in the profile description.

And this doesn’t just have the downside that the valuable description space becomes spammed, but an even bigger one for a user’s followers: They can’t just click on a URL to get to another social medium’s profile and follow the user there. Instead they have to manually paste the URL or user name of the influencer on other networks. Mostly on mobile. A real conversion killer. That’s the theory.

So let’s summarize the hypotheses:

1. Influencers usually use more than one social network (and the trend is pointing towards more and more).
2. There is no effective way for influencers to easily call their followers’ attention to all their social media profiles and websites at once.
3. For followers especially on mobile it’s annoying to add their influencers on other networks as well.

The idea came easily: A small service with which users can quickly build a simple profile page to aggregate all of their social media profiles in one place.

The users take this profile page as a central link on Instagram & co. Their followers click/tap on it, reach the overview and then click/tap on the desired social media profile to follow the influencer there?—?without having to manually paste or type anything on their phone.

The hypotheses:

1. Like this, influencers can more easily and more effectively lead followers to their other social media profiles and websites.
2. Cross-platform conversion will increase accordingly.
3. Profile descriptions will be unloaded and can be used for their actual purpose again: To find out more about the influencer.

Snapchat as a Booster

Snapchat’s strong growth this year further strengthened the theses. Because: Snapchat offers its users barely any possibilities to find the influencers they’re following on Instagram and co. This in turn leads to a situation where many users on Instagram regularly try to use postings to call their followers’ attention to their Snapchat account:

Next, followers have to go to the Snapchat app, enter the “Add Friend” dialogue, and finally manually (!) type in the Snapchat user name they had to memorize (!) on Instagram.

At exactly this point, the new web service would be a great help: The user would only have to click on the influencer’s Instagram profile link, would reach the new service’s profile page which aggregates all of the influencer’s social media profiles, and there click/tap on the influencer’s Snapchat account to follow them directly, no manual entries needed.

Definition of the Target Group

As my extended target group I defined all users who have a profile on more than one social network and have an interest in having as many followers as possible. To start out, though, it’s important to have a core target group, a nucleus from which the idea can grow.

Finding the best nucleus for this idea was easy: Obviously it would be influencers, especially fashion bloggers. On average they’re very active on multiple social media profiles and at the same time have big interest in increasing the number of their followers and visitors on different platforms.

As a possible second core target group, would be influencers from the tech scene: startup founders, investors, notable developers, designers, online marketing experts, etc. This means people who usually have profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn/Xing, Facebook and vertical platforms like GitHub, Stackoverflow, Dribble and Behance, but also maintain their own website or blog. These as well are mostly people who are interested in having an audience as large as possible for their different platforms.

But: First things first. To start out, I found fashion bloggers more fitting since they directly earn their money with social media profiles.

Competitive Analysis

The next step was to see if what I was thinking of already existed or not. Of one thing I was certain: There was no similar sevice that was being widely used in the blogging scene. I knew that because I’d been active in the scene for a long time already. But naturally that’s not enough of an analysis.

I was familiar with about.me of course and had my own profile on there. In my eyes, the service is a good platform to comprehensively introduce yourself. It’s also great as a career page that presents your CV in a visually attractive way or functions as introductory page for consultants and freelancers.

In terms of angle, however, about.me didn’t match the vision I had: an incredibly simple landing page serving as a distribution point to a user’s respective social media profiles. A page that puts the user’s social media profiles in the spotlight. One that can be created and viewed in a simple and straightfoward way on mobile. No big degrees of flexibility, very purposely no big creative demands for the profile owner. Barely any blogger I spoke to (see “Customer Validation”) knew about.me?—?they just weren’t the primary about.me target group.

Now it was about finding out if there was another service out there that came close to my idea. I did a simple Google research. I didn’t find anything?—?except for www.follow.me. And lo and behold?—?the marketing page promised exactly what I’d imagined as my own project. It seemed that someone?—?as it always happens?—?had had the exact same idea. So I tested the product. And quickly came to the conclusion: good idea, bad execution (sorry, with all due respect). I liked neither the design nor the UX. This execution wasn’t the cool, simple service I imagined, and it didn’t appear very popular either.

Accordingly, I wasn’t discouraged to carry out my idea. On the contrary.

Customer Validation

I always preach to every founder: Talk to your target group before you implement your product. That’s the only way you’ll find out if people out there are even interested in your idea.

Therefore, I went to talk to some fashion bloggers. A few of them I already knew, others I contacted directly on Instagram (via private message).

I admit I talked to way too few of them?—?just 5 bloggers. But that was only feasible since the matter was a case study and not an actual business. If I’d had the goal of actually founding a true business, my goal wouldn’ve rather been to contact 20 people before I’d even lifted a finger for development.

In my case, the 5 bloggers immediately understood what my idea was about?—?because it addressed an issue that they knew only too well from their own blogging activity.

All 5 bloggers liked the idea (even though I’d asked for extra-critical feedback) and said that they’d create a profile with the service to bundle all their social media presences into one page. 3 of the bloggers also said that they’d set their new profile page as profile link on Instagram. 2, on the other hand, weren’t sure about that because they were using the link to lead to their blog?—?and that was important to them.

That was a crucial point, since my idea only made sense if the users linked their new, aggregated profile on their existing profile pages. Only then would their followers become aware of the new service and therefore also of the user’s other social media profiles.

This already uncovered a critical factor for success: Would it be possible to get users to link the new service on their current social media profiles?

It’s a very good example that shows how important it is to talk to your target group.

For me the result of the feedback was: The target group immediately understands the concept, the feedback is generally very positive, the aspect of link usage on established profiles should be tracked carefully.

Marketing Validation

The idea was set and for a start validated with the target group at least on a small scale. But that isn’t enough to directly start with realizing a project. Many forget to think on how to distribute their product to their costumers ahead of time.

The consequence: Millions of zombie projects out there that were lovingly created but of which no one has heard.

Therefore: Always consider first how to get your first 1.000 users. And no, don’t count on “viral snowball effects.”

Many believe marketing is all about outstanding campaign ideas, high creativity, etc. At the beginning, though, it’s mostly door-to-door canvassing.

That’s why you should always question critically how realistic it is to gain your first 1.000 users and how to do it exactly.

It’s even more crucial if you’re starting your project on the side, without any big means for paid marketing.

For my idea, SEO was out of the question as a primary measure?—?the idea has too little unique content for that. And it would take too long for this case study.

I always like models where the first few hundred users can be actually contacted manually through canvassing. During a B2B side project that I built when I was in college (and in the end sold to a media company), I acquired the first 500 customers via search and manual approach on Xing (German LinkedIn competitor). Back then I sat in lectures, half-listening to the professor, and writing to potential customers (and distributing vouchers while at it). I was known for that with my classmates?—?they rather wondered if there was a professor who got my undivided attention.

But back to the current topic: The fundamentally relevant questions are:

1. Where do I find my first users?
2. How do I approach them?

With this case study topic, the questions were easily covered:

1. The fashion bloggers I was primarily searching for were mostly found on Instagram. Even if I hadn’t always been well-connected in the scene, I could’ve found the most important influencers from scratch with just a little research. Moreover, Instagram by now offers a feature that recommends similar profiles to a user’s followers:

In this way you can pragmatically find a lot, if not to say an endless amount of fashion bloggers.

2. Using the direct message function, it’s easy to personally contact the bloggers on Instagram. Moreover, many bloggers provide an email address on their Instagram profile because they’re hoping to be contacted by advertisers:

Accordingly, I had my hypothesis of how to find and approach the first users. Check.

Finding the Team

For executing my undertaking, I was missing two components:

1. A techie: While I had coded myself years before, I didn’t have enough time to brush up and expand on my skills in the way necessary for this project.
2. A designer: Though I claim to have a good eye for visual matters and long years of experience in UX and UI design, I wasn’t the right person for realizing the idea, but instead much more effective in a supervising role for a great designer.

It took a week until I’d assembled my team. How? In my previous blog post I reported how much of a good idea a side project can be to gain experience with a newly melded team, and to possibly work together with this team for future projects as well.

Thanks to this I knew relatively fast who my candidates of choice were: Two co-founders I’d worked with on a side project many years before.

Both of them liked the idea of the case study so much that they immediately said yes.

And like this we were a team of three.

Naming

I have to admit: I love developing names for web projects.

Important for me for this current case study was:

1. The name should be as telling as possible. When a user set their profile with the new service as a link on Instagram & co., their followers should ideally see from the URL itself what would expect them.
2. Free domain. Ideally a .com. For a case study like this, I didn’t want to spend money buying a domain, not even taking into consideration the extra time effort of that.

My domain of choice would’ve been follow.me?—?it’s short and incredibly telling. But as explained above, the URL was already taken.

The next choice would’ve been followme.com?—?but that one was taken as well.

After evaluating multiple other options, I decided on allmyprofiles.com. Unfortunately the domain is rather long, yet it’s very telling and free, too.

With that the project had a name: allmyprofiles.

Conceptual Design

When I was 20, I devised my first web portal. As a side project. An incredibly (much too) complicated B2B marketplace. In the course of the project, I first learned how to design a web portal, as well as how to plan a UX and information architecture on the digital sketch board.

Numerous other projects followed where I drew up web projects for my startups down to the last detail and gave that conception to both the developers and the designers. It wasn’t long till I learned: There’s nothing better than visual concepts?—?done right, they’re by far more efficient than purely text-based lists of requirements. Right from the start I worked with wireframes and furnished them with all comments necessary for implementing the UX and information architecture, usually paired with a text document.

This experience of years was to my advantage with drafting the allmyprofiles MVP of course. I a) created a Google Doc in which I described the whole project and the feature scope for the MVP and b) developed a wireframe concept from this:

Execution and Launch

On the basis of the concept, designer and developer started executing it. It was a remote process?—?in the course of the entire project we actually never got together for a face-to-face meeting even once. Team communication took place entirely on Slack, task management on Trello.

Once again I quickly realized how much time goes into the discussion and realization of the smallest details, if you want to build a well-rounded product. As a user we tend to seriously underestimate the amount of work that has been put into a small feature. Here as well the experience of implementing your own product helps a lot?—?like this you also appreciate it much more when other founder teams out there build an excellent product.

When it came to execution, we used classical MVP logic and focused only on the features we needed to start out. All other thousands of ideas for features we struck out of the scope with rigid discipline?—?even if it often wasn’t an easy decision. Anyone can think of lots of great features; it’s much more difficult to know what to leave out and what truly is necessary from a cost-benefit view.

For the system’s sign-in we decided not to build our own sign-up but instead allow users to log in with their Instagram or Facebook account. If not with this idea that is all about social media profiles, where then?

To allow log-in via Instagram and Facebook, it was necessary to get both networks’ API approval. The forms for these requests I filled in myself. Those are exactly the kinds of experiences that also help me as an investor to better understand startups on a hands-on level. In my role as investor I look at so many startups for which a connect via Facebook and Instagram is a fundamental part of their user accounts that it was very valuable for me to go through an API approval process first-hand. And also to experience how dependent everything is on the big networks…

Launch, Test, Optimization

After getting the approval from Instagram and Facebook and running various tests with around 10 users (us + friends), we launched allmyprofiles roughly 3 months after the idea first came up.

Especially the first users’ feedback helped us a lot to solve the biggest UX problems. We looked over the shoulders of a few friends and found UX issues that we wouldn’t even have considered in the slightest otherwise.

For example, it wasn’t clear enough for multiple users how to edit their profile after their inital onboarding and how to add new social media profiles to their allmyprofiles page (pretty disastrous, yes).

These big problems we could solve with UX optimizations before we started addressing a broader audience. Please always do the same!

Don’t even think of a Big Bang.

Start with a few test users first and expand your target group bit by bit. Otherwise you’ll lose lots of steam if you initially approach too many users while your product isn’t ready for them.

Another big problem that we quickly found:

More and more users made a profile with our service, but didn’t link it anywhere. It wasn’t clear enough to the users that their allmyprofiles page was only useful if they actually linked it on their existing profiles.

Accordingly, we brainstormed countermeasures and decided on two pragmatic solutions:

1. Right after creation of a profile, we gave the user the advice to next link his new allmyprofiles page in their social media profiles.
2. A day after sign-up, we sent a reminder email in which we explain once again how important it is to complete the linking.

What we payed much attention to with both measures: Users seldom read texts. Therefore the best solutions are clear, visual examples. With a simple picture strip we tried to make clear to users what to do on both the website and via email:

The result: Directly after launching the two new measures, the rate of users linking their allmyprofiles page on their social media profiles grew significantly. And this right from the first user who registered after roll-out. Those are the small achievements that make playing around with web projects so much fun. :)

Approaching Users

Now our product was ready to approach a wider audience. As planned, I started contacting the first bloggers via Instagram. I could’ve broadly scaled this?—?but the whole thing is just a case study for me. So I rather looked for ways that wouldn’t leave me to spend entire weekends reaching out to bloggers on Instagram day and night, yet allowed me to scale the project for a first, more extended test run. Two measures lent themselves to this:

1. Finding cheap helpers who take over the aproach of Instagram users for me. Upwork.com was a speedy solution. :)
2. A form of marketing that is a bit more automated and therefore more scalable, which specifically targets international users with an explicit interest in generating followers for their Instagram account. For this, creativity and technical skill were needed. What the idea was exactly? Well, I don’t want to reveal everything here. :) No, not spam. Not really. In any case, the ratio of effort and benefit was phenomenal. Sorry for being so secretive?—?but apart from this I’ve been maximally transparent, haven’t I?

Here are two beautiful examples from actual users?—?a fashion blogger and a tech expert (look at the number of profiles added!):

Roadmap

There are many great ideas of how allmyprofiles could be developed further. For me, though, it was a case study, not a business project. For now we’ll remain with the current scope of features and if the market wants more, my two co-founders are taking care of it. I have a different main job and the invest was enough to illustrate a blog post. :)

Invest

• Time invested: Ca. 10 weekends with 3–5 hours each. For me, the effort spent was higher at the beginning (idea validation & conceptual design), yet lower during technical execution, and then higher again toward the end (testing & launch).
• 20 EUR per month for the server
• ca. 500 USD for marketing support

That’s all. Really.

CONCLUSION

Guys, don’t spend years talking about how much you’d like to try founding?—?just do it, even if it’s only a side project.

If a VC can do it “on the side,” you can do it, too. And certainly much better. Do it. Now.

Iskender Dirik ? www.allmyprofiles.com/iskender