Snapsort.com: Reflecting on our launch

Snapsort.com went live about three weeks ago. We thought we were launching such a small set of features that not many would be interested in. Our goal was to see if we could get some organic google traffic. Somehow we attracted thousands of visitors!

Backstory

Our vision for snapsort.com is a site that gives personalized unbiased camera recommendations, we imagine it being a bit like a conversation with a good friend who knows a lot about cameras (see my blog post).

Instead of spending ages building this incredible site and then releasing it all at once, our plan is to release little pieces of it at a time, and get feedback as we go. On January 6th we started by launching a camera comparison feature.

Traffic

We didn’t expect many people to visit our site. We thought the camera comparison feature was slightly interesting, but didn’t really think anyone else would find it useful on its own, to us it was just a step along the way to our vision.

We hoped we might start to get some traffic from Google, and we thought our friends and family would visit. And on the first few days it was just friends and family visiting. But a few days later, a few photography sites found the site, and blogged about it, sending us thousands of visitors over night!

We’ve now had over 49,000 visits to our site according to Google Analytics. Now many sites receive way more visits than that every day, but its way more than we thought we’d have at this point.

Traffic has since died back down, but we’ve now gained a small audience of interested users, and found out that if you build something interesting and useful that people love they will tell others about it.

Usage and Feedback

During those 49,000 visits, we’ve had over 6,000 separate combinations of cameras compared!

Shortly after launch we added a feature to show the most popular comparisons on the our home page, and on each comparison page shows a list of other popular comparisons for each of those cameras.

Whats Next

We’re still working away on new features for the site, so stay tuned!  Feel free to join in the conversation at our support site, or follow us on facebook or twitter.