I met Derek when I was on vacation in NYC last summer. He took the time to meet with me (a nobody who he just "knew" from twitter) and explained me the big vision behind Greatist. He's crazy passionate and not afraid to make mistakes (which this article shows perfectly.). It's been awesome to see him talk to the "big guys" in the fitness industry all of a sudden. This shows, once again: Hard work pays off, people. Go Derek & go Greatist! :)
Our growth has been nearly entirely social, with the 60% driven by sites like Pinterest, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, & Twitter. The rest mostly comes from our syndication partnerships. Outside of some free trials from Google Adwords, we've never paid for any visitors... and we've never been covered by any major outlet either. We've grown 35% on average each of the last 5 months & it's all organic.
Mix of both, we've got some pretty epic profiles-- but the majority comes from others sharing our stuff w/ their friends. Strong believer in this as a trend (Buzzfeed talks about this, too: http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/content-shared-close-fr...)
4. Surround yourself with friends who will remind you
you’re awesome when you need it & shit on you when it’s
time.
I hate it when my friends go out of their way to say nice things about my work. They do that because they know much effort I put into my work, and they don't want to make me feel bad.
But this is counter-productive. You're not helping me if you don't point out what can be improved!
Exactly. Recently I asked a friend to check out a site I just uploaded, he sent me some nice compliments. Later I realized that on IE (which he uses) the layout was all off.
You need honest friends. I looked at a little iOS game a friend of mine was doing. I told him what I like about it. I also told him everything I thought was wrong about it. He was asking me for honest feedback so I gave it.
I didn't have to be mean about it, just clear and straight forward. "I don't like the way this works because ..." "I don't like the way this looks because ..."
Once I had a friend check out my site. However, he spelled it wrong and went to a domain parking page. He had just said, "oh it looks nice," before I cut him off and told him the right spelling! :D
I, actually agree with the author. I am based in a city where entrepreneurship is not the common thing. My friends from that city told me many a times that I'd fail.
Its painful. You need support on some days. And surrounding yourself with people who provide positive energy is such a great thing.
Your friends perhaps see the potential of your work and not its current state? :-)
Are you planning to partner with a larger conglomerate like Everyday Health to make money through advertising, or you plan to build your own sales team?
Also, do you have any plans to increase engagement in your site? I envision the number of page views per visitor is 2-3 or so?
Lastly, how would you remain sustainable if Google one day decided to penalize you for whatever reason?
Thanks for reading-- we're actually currently partners w/ Everyday Health for advertising & have no plans to build out a major sales team in the near future. We're hoping to build a business that isn't driven by ad sales, but instead driven by guiding people to products, tools, and services that are as high-quality as our content & will help them achieve their goals.
In terms of engagement-- we have a lot on the way. Right now our focus has been purely to build the highest-quality brand equity and an audience. We've got a 26% return rate, so think we're doing something right so far-- though obviously there's a long way to go and a lot more to do.
Our traffic is currently less than 6% driven by Google search-- but we're already ranking for some pretty awesome terms ahead of some classic incumbents. We believe we're writing among the highest-quality content in the space already (every fact cited by a PubMed study, every article approved by multiple experts) & that if we keep consistently doing that and people keep returning & noticing that we likely won't penalized by Google in the future. My take at least!
Nice. If you ever want to explore drop-in route planning using maps (OSM and/or google), as well as activity tracking using GPS data, we have an extensive javascript API to interact with our service. Basically, we handle everything complicated, and it's just a matter of JS developers and designers making it nice on your front end.
