There are a lot of hard things about starting media businesses. The one hardest thing I keep bumping into though is what I’m starting to call the “weird bump”. This is a weird, short-lived and unexplained growth spurt I’ve seen a lot of my sites/apps/bots experience.
About a week after launching Morning Short, in about a day, the list grew from 1,200 to 7,000. I did nothing to cause this. At the time, I had my system set up to send me every new user, so I woke up very confused. Even more confusing, all the new users were french.
For about two days I wondered whether these users were fake, but they were indeed real, and really interested in what I had to offer. Maddiningly though, I had no idea where they came from. I couldn’t find the source in France that had sent me thousands of French men and women looking to learn English.
Besides the challenge of attribution, sources like these often change the dynamic of your subscribe/customer base. I went from a list of mainly students and engineers, to a list of people from all over the world, with different goals. Some wanted to learn English, while others were fluent or native and just wanted a good, challenging story. This difference of goals led to months of confusion for me, as I tried to figure out how to please both groups.
I got another “weird bump” today in one of my latest experiments, Fiction Pal. Fiction Pal is a facebook bot for helping people read more. I started the day with a little over 100 users. Throughout the day, my phone kept buzzing with new signups. It took me until about 9PM tonight to realize that perhaps something unusual might be happening. I peeked at my stats today to notice that my active userbase had grown by 2-300 users in one day. This time they’re from largely the Phillipines and India. As of yet, I have no idea who sent them to my bot, or for what purpose.
This is actually not the first “weird bump” I’ve seen from The Phillipines. My podcast, Morning Short, has seen a “weird bump” in traffic to one particular Youtube video from the country. There’s always the chance that both the weird bumps are fake, but they appear to be real. Perhaps the biggest reading startup out there, Wattpad, is known for having a disproportionately large base of users in the Phillipines. They’re so popular that many of the country’s films are based on stories created on their platform.
Still, if this growth continues, I’ll have to really rethink my plans for Fiction Pal. I was designing it as a platform for US readers, people I know. Designing for users you don’t know, and a country you don’t know, would seem to be a much harder task.
As challenging as “weird bumps” are though, they are a blessing, particularly when they don’t fade away. They are the invisible hand of the free market telling you “you’re targeting the wrong customer, but we’ve found an ideal customer for you”. They are a sign that you’re building a product that someone loves, even if that someone is not who you were originally planning for.