How We Sold Our Startup to Facebook & Skyrocketed Our Growth On 1st of April!

Hi, my name is Harsh Snehanshu and I’m one of the founders of the week-old bootstrapped start-up, Whereabout, a nearby friends of friends finder. In one line, we enable people to discover & chat with their nearby 2nd contacts bypassing the need for friend requests or phone numbers.

Our differentiation is this: our chat platform is comparable with the best of the best in the world, second only to Whatsapp. Yes, we are confident because we are technically quite sound. Really sound! Check out my CTO cofounder’s kickass profile. Anyhow, let’s get to the story first.

The other night (31st March), disappointed with India’s terrible loss at the hands of the West Indies, I returned to my room and started clicking the unread emails. One of the few mails was from Product Hunt, a website I frequent daily, and it read like this:

I was blown away. It was made using Clonezine, a website cloning software, and Product Hunt’s mail was about how to use such softwares to growth hack your way on the once in a year event April Fool’s Day. It was like a bootstrapper’s elixir. It was 11 pm, and I was totally caught off guard for not remembering that it was fool’s day an hour ahead. I had one hour in hand and I had to craft something innovative. Well, this is what I did. The biggest eye-catcher: a TechCrunch article outlining our acquisition for the April’s fools.

And then I posted it on the social media: on Whereabout’s facebook page, on my Facebook page (I’m a writer with a decent following) and ran an advertisement from our free FBstart ad credits. And slept.

We slept with 150 downloads of the app. When I woke up and saw the figures, the app had 296 downloads, and the entire night was abuzz with activity. Over 2000 messages exchanged. Friends had shared it across their social media, congratulating us. Overall, the post had reached over 12000 users on the social media. A dozen of my friends and relatives rang me up to congratulate, only to be left with an amused laughter.

By the afternoon, the torrent of usage had befuddled us, and I was forced to open up to friends that it was actually a prank, which sort of calmed people down and resulted in swear words with occasional splashes of “genius”, “brilliant, i fell for it”, “haraami” and more.

The entire process could have failed if our product sucked, but it didn’t. We have unknowingly created a product that users love to love, because there’s nothing like it anywhere. This is the response we got from the new users, who used the product for the first time in the past 24 hours. We were completely floored.

Five things that really helped make our growth hack work:

1. Timing: I posted the TechCrunch clone precisely at 12 last night, while India was busy mourning over Kohli and couldn’t even think that it was an April Fool’s Day hoax.
2. Serious Beginning: Telling a fake story requires you to do it with all seriousness. If you read the first three paragraphs of the story, it goes like this. My being a freelance journalist before came handy while pulling off the start. This is how it began:

Networking giant Facebook Inc. has acquired the innovative Indian start-up Whereabout in an undisclosed cash and stock deal. This news comes just a month after the Indian company launched its app on the Google Play Store and Mark Zuckerberg stumbled upon it by chance.

As part of the acquisition terms, Whereabout will work as an independent app and the founders will shift base to Facebook’s Palo Alto office in California. With this acquisition, Facebook intends to tighten its focus on the local networking space, where apps like Tinder are already steps ahead. Mark Zuckerberg, speaking on the acquisition, said,”Whereabout is solving a great need — of enabling discovery and interaction of 2nd connections with a tap of a button. The team is committed and promising, and the product vision is just great. It’s awesome to have those two guys on board.”

Started in 2016 by two IIT Delhi alumni, Ashish Singh and Harsh Snehanshu, Delhi-based Whereabout had enabled 2000 local connections and 5000+ messages within 3 weeks of its launch. It did so with an innovative feature called knock, which allows users to knock on the doors of nearby friends of friends (you actually get a Ding Dong sound!), and once responded to, it straightaway sends you to a chat screen.

3. Subtle Ending: Most people don’t read till the end and we exploited that during our article. It became funnier and weirder as one proceeded, at one time, even quoting me saying the following:

“With this acquisition, Whereabout stops being a threat to Facebook, which it was becoming. Mark was paranoid that we would throttle them, and steal all their users away, as we were doing in the past couple of weeks. Have a look at this graph, we had already taken 8 users away from them, who spent all their time stuck on our app, chatting with their nearby friends of friends. It was not too far when this 8 would turn into 8 billion, given the fact how much users loved us. So Mark made a tough call.”

The last line would have conveyed that it was an April Fool’s prank, but less than 1% people reached there.

4. Inclusion of our personal story infographic: The most moving stories are the ones that share the travails of your journey. We included our journey’s infographic (below) in the TechCrunch hoax and it immersed our readers emotionally.

5. Having a great product: This is the most important bit. The entire hoax could have totally bombed had our product not been good, but the case is: we have built an awesome product, something that competes with the best of the best in the world. That’s what gave us the confidence to pull it off, that’s what made our users even take the news seriously. We have taken Neil Gaiman’s famous advice “Make Good Art” to our product and I’m sure it’d reflect if you use it once.

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Today has been a good day, and the busiest. By now, we have got 200+ downloads without spending a penny, and a reach of 17000 people. And tomorrow, we will have to come up with newer and more creative ways to hustle, and innovate on our bootstrapped budget.

To end this article, I’d like to quote a conversation that followed between me and one of my friends.

Friend: This was brilliant! But…what if Facebook sues you for using their name?

Me: Well, then I will thank Facebook for not learning from our government’s mistakes and creating a Kanhaiya Kumar out of our beloved Whereabout

Reach us at hi@whereabout.in or on Twitter @harshsnehanshu with any feedback, advice or help; and do check our website that is structured as an investment deck.

Until then, have fun reading our entire article here.

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