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Viral on Reddit: 47k visitors, 12k users, 12 hours

Viral on Reddit: The consequences of 30,756 upvotes and 47,611 visitors in 10 hours.

This is a post-mortem write up on the effect of Rezi unexpectedly going viral on Reddit starting on the morning of Friday, November 14th.

Product Hunt is a website that lists new products for people to upvote creating a curated list of the day's coolest software launches. It's pretty popular too. If you get to the top of the list you'll be the product of the day, just for 24 hours, and seen by thousands.

When I was researching best practices, I came across multiple articles that shared the story of companies that planned their launch down to the hour... months in advanced. Rezi was no different. From the carefully designed product-photos and expertly-animated explainer video to the email we sent out to past users, every detail was considered.

We shuffled to the office at 7pm KST and launched Rezi at 2am PST - just two 2 hours into the day so we could maximize our launch's exposure. We anxiously watched as nothing really happened (lol). Rezi just stagnated in the middle of the day's list of 20 or so products... pretty disappointing considering the effort. Yet the team was in the office and ready to stay up all night to support the launch.

By the end of the 24th hour, approximately 245 people signup for Rezi. Worthless.

Let's go back to around 11pm, about 4 hours into the plodding Product Hunt launch - I figured since I was going to be awake all night, it as a great time to do an improvised AMA on Reddit - an AMA (Ask Me Anything) a conversation where you list what is unique about yourself and people get to ask questions about you. It's a hugely popular community with over 20 million subscribers. From A-list celebrities to Barack Obama, this subreddit pulls some big names and often blows up to huge threads & tens-of-thousands of upvotes considering it is conversation-based unlike other picture-based subreddits.

Typically, I try to do one small AMA for the Korea subreddit once a year to talk about being a leading startup in Korea... But since it was launch night, I decided to talk about something else - the founding story of Rezi and how it led to the creation of our new software:

"When I graduated college, I had interviews at Google, Dropbox, Goldman Sachs, and others because of my resume, despite a 2.2 GPA. Now we've build a software to make the same resume for free. AMA!"

What happens next is every marketer's wet dream - the conversation went nuclear.

Here are the consequences of going viral on Reddit:

• 30,756 upvotes and 3,128 comments

• Reddit flooded Rezi with a torrential flow of about 500 users at any given time

• 47,611 visitors landed on the Rezi website

• 7,239 created a Rezi account. 3,844 created an anonymous guest Rezi account

By the end of the day, 30,756 upvotes and 3,128 comments later, My ad-libbed AMA was at the top of the 20,000,000 subscriber Subreddit for about 8 hours (take that Product Hunt!).

Unfortunately, I don't know how many people read the AMA but I do know how many people visited Rezi as well as the number of people who signed up for a Rezi account.

For approximately 12 hours straight, Reddit flooded Rezi with a torrential flow of about 500 users at any given time.

By the end of the day, 47,611 visitors landed on the Rezi website. An absurd amount compared to the usual 90 - 250 daily visitors when we aren't actively marketing anything.

Of these 47,611 visitors, 7,239 created a Rezi account. 3,844 created an anonymous guest account. You can see the effects on our growth graph in the admin below.

Here are my after-thoughts categorized by what went right, what went wrong, and what I learned.

What went right:

• I posted very early on a slow morning with no interesting AMAs. The moderator of the AMA subreddit gave my post a badge which almost immediately which resulted in more attention.

• The tone-setting first question was about user privacy - The answer was well received (We don't sell user data in any capacity).

• Handled critical comments well and without provoking more negativity.

What went wrong (a lot):

• Reddit is known to be strictly anti-promotion and many users thought that this was a paid post.

• I had linked to the wrong image of the resume and as a result many people dismissed my knowledge of a resume and criticized the effectiveness of the software.

• In the early hours of the morning (3-7am) I made a ton of typos and gave such tired answers that some questioned my English speaking abilities (lol again).

• Product Hunt

What I learned:

• A result like this is not repeatable. This will absolutely never happen again and the same result would cost thousands of dollars in marketing budget. I am very grateful for the coincidences that lead to the success of the post.

• Users love Rezi.

• The vocal minority of Reddit is incredibly charged, suspicious, and accusatory of ill-intent.

Well, that's about all I have to say.

Thanks for reading.

Full article here - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/viral-reddit-consequences-30756-upvotes-47611-visitors-jacob-jacquet/

  1. 4

    Congrats Jacob, inspiring story :)

  2. 2

    Such a great way to provide value to the subreddit while authentically sharing the product.

    Awesome work, thanks for sharing!

  3. 2

    Great story. Thanks for sharing it!

  4. 2

    Wow, that's brilliant! I never would have thought about doing an AMA, let alone the number of users it could drive to your app!

    1. 1

      Fun stuff. I agree! Actually doing the AMA was a thrill. Such a unique feeling to have so many people share their thoughts on my work, both positive and negative!

  5. 2

    Congrats!

    Was your infrastructure prepared for these numbers? I know a lot of people here would be on free AWS/Azure/Firebase plans but if they got this sort of traffic it might send their bills skyrocketing...

    1. 2

      I know this is a terrible answer, but I think so - this is what I see in our Firebase billing account for November -

      Nov 1 – 30, 2019
      App Engine Cloud Firestore Read Ops: 2502045 Counts (Source:Rezi [rezi-3f268])
      $1.14

      Nov 1 – 30, 2019
      App Engine Cloud Firestore Entity Writes: 481818 Counts (Source:Rezi [rezi-3f268])
      $0.69

      1. 2

        Cool thanks for replying.

      2. 1

        What types of data are you storing? Less than $2 for 3m database ops seems pretty incredible.

        1. 1

          It would be normal resume content in the form of plain text

  6. 2

    Thanks for sharing.

  7. 2

    Super interesting to hear about your success on AMA! I will definitely try that for my upcoming launch of Men Going East.

    1. 1

      Yea the thing for us was it was never meant to be in any way promotional. I just love talking to people about my company. As to why it got so big, I think resumes are always a popular topic on Reddit. I would definitely be cautious but it's a great idea to try!

  8. 1

    I noticed you only mentioned visits and signups, but not conversions. How many of these converted to sales?

    I saw that thread on reddit, and to be honest it was very clickbaity. (because I even ended up checking out the website. haha)

    1. 2

      The AMA resulted in several thousands of dollars in sales that day and the following days since usually just under 1k. Our average signups per day have gone from around 30 to 500

  9. 1

    Very cool. Great job!

    I totally agree with you regarding Reddit. It is a conversational and anti-promotional platform. Even the ads have to to be differently for Reddit as compared to Google or FB.

  10. 1

    Good, write up. I am constantly using Reddit as a part of my growth strategy, but I usually target smaller subs, between 30K and 100K subscribers. The results are quite good - every other post I manage to get 1-2K highly targeted visitors. I would never think about using AMA subreddit though. Would you share what was a conversion from free to paid? Did you manage to get any of the users to upgrade?

    1. 1

      It was quite small from free to paid - less than 1% but we do have a resume review service integrated into the app which allows users to flag a Rezi resume in their dashboard for review with prices starting at 8$. Which is dirt cheap for a resume review. The conversation rate for that service was much higher

      1. 1

        Cool. And yeah, the price is dirt cheap! I would rise it to sub-20s ;)

  11. 1

    Wow ! Congrats. When I launch, I'll give this strategy a shot.

    1. 1

      I would suggest not doing it this way - we launched our company about 4 years ago and brought a very well thought out service to Reddit. If you try to force it, I can't see it going well

  12. 1

    How much did your server cost increase by?

  13. 1

    your product hunt demonstration video is amazing

    1. 1

      Thanks we are lucky to have a great talent in front of the camera and a knowledgable editor behind it!

  14. 1

    This is interesting and impressing but why don't just give the link to your reddit epic post?

      1. 1

        Thanks!
        The comments look the same epic as your post :))))

  15. 1

    I'm Korean and KST caught my eye. How did you end up in Korea?

    1. 1

      http://www.mobiinside.com/2017/12/05/rezi-korea-startup/

      It's a bit old but the points are about the same.

      In addition to the answers in the article, I wanted to try to do something really, really difficult

      1. 1

        Awesome - thanks Jacob. All the best to you 👍👏

  16. 1

    That is so amazing, @jacobj132! Turning around a slow PH launch into a high-traction AMA on Reddit—such a cool story to tell everyone who joins your team after! :-)

  17. 1

    Congrats on the success! I wonder if an AMA will become the marketing hack of 2020...

    I'm following since I give out some advice in the world of resumes and a partnership could be beneficial someday!

  18. 1

    Great story Jacob. What luck you had, but you were also prepared to capitalize on that luck when it hit. Well done.

    Separately, I've noticed a bunch of the resume builders are based in either Korea or Taiwan. Is there something to that, or pure coincidence?

    1. 1

      I've spent a lot of time researching and have never came across another builder in Korea specifically - would you mind sharing the name of the ones you have in mind?

      I know Cake Resume is in SEA

      1. 1

        Ah, I thought Cake was in Korea, but they're in Taipei. The other one in Taipei is Resume Genius/Taroko.

  19. 1

    @jacobj132 Nice. Love the simplicity of Rezi. I think this can help a lot of my customers at https://nonprofitremote.com

    1. 1

      Sure if there is any way you have in mind, please let me know

  20. 1

    Rezi is a very well thought out application. I was looking for this!

    1. 1

      Thanks! What makes you think it is well thought out?

      1. 1

        More than a simple cv preparation application. Applicant tracking system. Is there machine learning?

        1. 1

          In the future we hope to introduce more ML elements in to matching the resumes & job postings directly

  21. 1

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

  22. 3

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 4

      No it was by coincidence - from the mod himself

      "I gave it an award - have not had any communications with the OP other than what you see here in this thread. I gave it the award because i thought it was a cool product, and he answered all my questions about privacy and such. The main reason it went to the frontpage was there's not much else going on on iama right now - he got lucky."

      https://www.reddit.com/user/cahaseler?count=50&after=t1_f7i3o27

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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