Become Instagram Famous. Alexander Metelev
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Название: Become Instagram Famous
Автор: Alexander Metelev
Издательство: Издательские решения
Жанр: Современная русская литература
isbn: 9785448595745
isbn:
The launch of Instalex
After what happened I have decided to create my own Instagram promotion service. Back when I befriended German Yakushev and frequented “Startup Academy’ I also met Misha Kitin, a programmer who was working on his own solution for promotion software for Instagram. I reached out to him and we decide to create a joint venture. Our team consisted of just two of us: I was responsible for the service development and client involvement, Misha was improving the system and maintaining it. After 5 months of our collaborative work we have rolled out the first version of our platform under the name Instalex.
From the very start we were in many ways different from our business rivals in terms of interface and how everything was set up: in its core it was a cloud-based dashboard which allowed its users to easily get access to it, promote any amount of Instagram accounts and oversee the process online from any gadget at any time. I realized how important the cloud hosting was in promoting not only for me but for others also.
With the first version of our software released, we started to look for user testers and many people responded. It was not a surprise since the service was free to use for the test period and it was something completely different from others at the time. We spent a month on testing and were ready to officially launch the platform. But, to our great disappointment, after the launch and enabling paid subscriptions all of our testers turned it down, saying they “were not interested’ in using the service for a fee.
Everything from the how system worked to our website design was different comparing to what you can see on Instalex website now. Actually, there was no design or any logos whatsoever. We were using free templates from Bootstrap and lated designed and created the logo ourselves; everything was pretty much handmade. But our main quality was, of course, functionality. From the get-go, we had a unique system of promoting all accounts simultaneously. You only needed to sign up, add your Instagram profile and choose “promo’ – a channel through which your accounts would be promoted. Our catch was the accessibility, since it only required 5 minutes to start using the platform and setting it up would have taken even less time. You only had to set everything up once and forget about it for the next month. Instalex promotes each account using one “promo’ account at a time and does it 24/7 without any malfunctions or delays. When analyzing Instagram promotion software market, I have not seen another service that would allow its users to set everything up only once and never be bothered with checking back for any additional adjustments.
The next groundbreaking thing was the auto-commenting feature. Mass commenting was a big pain for every promotion service, even when there was such function in use, adding dozens and even hundreds of word combinations for comments was tedious for users. And so we were the first in the world to implement Spintax technology to arrange auto-commenting on Instagram. After the registration, each user would receive a preset comments kit. You only needed to add a channel which you want to promote and the system would do the rest for you.
And so it went on: we were rolling out new features while trying to handle the marketing predicaments. The first attempt at marketing failed miserably: our first advertisement was hosted by an Instagram blogger with impressive amount of followers who posted the photo of our service and gave a shout out to our platform. We have received no less than 300 visits from that add and no less than 0 purchases after those visits. We realized that without any budget this was not an option and started to look into other places to promote our product. Month after our website launched I put out advertisements on every forum, social network page or blog related to advertising in social networks. People were coming, but did not buy anything. We started to realize we were doing something wrong.
After analyzing the market and our opponents we have found out why nobody wanted to buy our service: there was no free trial period to test out the platform before purchasing it. A 3-day trial period was added for our clients and the business was slowly recovering. The next day we had a couple of new users and in a week we already had about 50 new users on our website. I have updated all existed ads and placed some new ones on about dozen other websites.
Things were going better and better. We had a steady flow of traffic and new users to our website. From the start the only supported language was English so we had clientele not only from Russia and other CIS countries but also from abroad. A month passed and we already had 600 users on our website! People from all over the world were coming to us because of our unique approach to business and because of our high-quality tech support. Feedback was among the most important aspect of communicating and staying in touch with our clients: we gathered their ideas and recommendations, considered them and added more user-requested features.
In the next six months we have witnessed substantial growth, with our ads being placed on every platform and forum that was possible for me to find. More people started coming from the word-of-mouth, our platform was promoted by our own users who recommended it to their friends and coworkers. After a while we became major players on the promotion market.
People on forums did not like us much, however. We were hugely criticized by big SMM-forums and bot-farm owners who left dozens and hundreds of negative reviews on our product. They claimed our platform was “too expensive’, we lacked the functionality and were “just another small-time promotion-service’. Against all bad-mouthers I believed in our product and kept on improving it. Only after 3 months we determined our target audience which was not the self-proclaimed SMM experts but rather average users who were solely interested in growing their followers on Instagram and nothing else. And so we have finally found our niche: small and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurs. Our platform was suitable for any user and it was easy to use for everyone!
Our first year in business ended on this positive note. We have seen considerable growth from 50 users to 100000 in just a 1-year period! We were featured in numerous publications and various mass media outlets and slowly were overtaking the Instagram promotion market. We have worked on every opportunity to reach a wider audience whether it required additional investments or not. We have collaborated with everyone from large brands to small ventures, promoted tens of thousands of Instagram accounts, acquired experience in marketing field, constantly, received advanced training and applied our vast knowledge in practice when working with our website. At the moment our website services an audience of 600000 users, our license provided to companies in over 16 countries, we have given more than 100 franchises to dealers from all over the world, while at the same time developing our platform and reaching more and more users!
From the day one we have seen our fair share of ups and downs, we have seen both immensely successful cases and met various obstacles on our way. We sure do have something to tell you about as we have been through a lot. I started from nothing with no money to invest and only because of the experience I obtained and by learning on my own mistakes me and my business could reach the heights that we have reached! We have managed to develop the product, attract wide audience and become favorites of our users. We still have got a lot to learn and this is not the end as after all we still keep going forward and keep pushing boundaries and make our product better and better! Thanks to our now 9-person team and our prolonged cooperative work we have met the result that we have today!
After more than 6 years of working with Instagram, we have gathered massive amount of knowledge and material to combine it into a single package which is the book you are currently reading! In the СКАЧАТЬ