Content Marketing Magic: Our Journey to Validate the Megacool SDK
Since 9 out of 10 startups fail, we spent the 2015 summer running 10 hackathons to find and pursue our billion-dollar potential startup idea. We had just decided to give Onboard two additional weeks.
Welcome to the seventh part of my Megacool startup story. In this post, you'll join me on my journey as a Megacool founder during the fall of 2015. We'll explore my journal entries, moments of frustration, and flashes of hope as we uncover a clever way to prove the value of the Megacool SDK idea.
Here’s an overview of the full series:
Part 1: How the Megacool journey began
Part 3: Embracing Failure – How we tested 10 different startup ideas over 10 weeks
Part 4: Hackathon 1-3: From AI travel agent to photo management adventures
Part 5: Hackathon 4-7: The messy middle
👉Part 7: How we validated the Megacool SDK👈 YOU ARE HERE
Part 8: How we built our co-founder team
Part 9: From idea to live product
Part 10: Our bootstrapping hustle
Part 11: How we raised $1.6m in funding
Part 12: How we got acquired
Part 13: From Alpha to Acquired: The product, growth, and business model journey
Part 14: The emotional founder roller coaster
Part 15: The epilogue: Reflections on the whole journey
On August 25th, we embarked on a two-week journey to explore the possibilities with Onboard. Initially a waitlist solution for app developers, Onboard had now evolved into a B2B player, addressing the universal challenge faced by app developers — cost-effective user acquisition.
See, we thought B2C was easy (biting my tongue here eight years later).
This time, my co-founder Nicolaj and I were smitten by the opportunity to learn something new. Stepping out of our comfort zones: B2B.
While our summer experiments dabbled in various directions, our bias leaned towards the allure of B2B opportunities, especially in the app domain – a realm we knew intimately, thanks to our years spent in mobile gaming.
Following the success of Fun Run, the mobile game Nicolaj and I had worked on together, I had recently written about the Fun Run Formula to explain all the factors that played a part in how and why the game went viral. When discussing our next steps with Onboard, we kept returning to the organic growth drivers that propelled Fun Run to stardom.
User sharing was a key virality driver for Fun Run. Yet, it struck us that users went through a convoluted process to do it:
Take a screenshot,
leave the game,
open social media (predominantly Instagram or Twitter),
upload the screenshot,
write something funny and
hit ‘post’.
What if we simplified the sharing process?
What if we could make it more dynamic, replacing images with videos and GIFs?
Would it increase a game’s chances of going viral?
I’m afraid that we’re not aiming high enough with Onboard. It feels like what we’re trying to do is right under our nose. We just need to speak to more people. — Journal entry from 2015-08-26
Learned a lot today. Most importantly, everyone wants organic growth as they don't have money to pay for marketing.
Thinking a lot about that we may not move fast enough since it's been three months since we started, and we haven't launched anything. — Journal entry from 2015-08-27
I’m getting a stronger and stronger feeling about Onboard. It’s something that everyone needs and spends time on today. I’m wondering what other opportunities we have out there that everyone needs? — Journal entry from 2015-08-28
Noticing that I'm not fully convinced about Onboard all the time. I often feel like Nicolaj is more excited than I am. I'm wondering if it's because I'm not able to clearly see all the steps ahead of us. I don't like that we haven't been able to book more meetings. — Journal entry from 2015-08-31
Navigating uncharted waters, we immersed ourselves in research. We reached out to anyone in the growth/app space, from app developers to potential competitors. We met with seven companies that first week.
We wanted answers. Clear, actionable answers. Those that only appear in startup movies and fictional books. The lack of concrete progress weighed on us.
Then, we had an epiphany—what if we set our sights on the upcoming Y Combinator (YC) application deadline? YC is the most famous startup accelerator, home to household names such as AirBnB, Dropbox, and Reddit.
In our youthful and naive optimism, we harbored the hope that YC would be our ticket to solving all our problems and that riding into the sunset on our unicorns would be a guaranteed outcome.
The application was due mid-October. We had so much signaling that helping app developers grow cost-effectively was a massive opportunity with lots of money in it. If only we could figure out exactly what our solution to their problems would be. We kept pondering the question: “
Can we create a scalable turn-key solution for developers to improve their growth and/or onboarding?”
YC's primary focus revolves around growth. However, we lacked the tangible growth metrics to showcase without a live product. Nevertheless, we devised a strategy to generate momentum and measure it, hopefully offering the YC partners a glimpse of the potential success on the horizon.
In the absence of a better idea, we decided to give ourselves five more weeks to explore Onboard and use our knowledge to apply to YC.
Our workback schedule for the YC interview became our roadmap:
Create a landing page1 to capture interest
Drive traffic to the landing page via content marketing to understand user needs
Build a demo MVP based on our findings
Until now, we’d been looking at the problem space for apps as a whole, but we saw the benefit of narrowing it down to first solving it for games – given we knew that space the best.
Our content marketing strategy revolved around blog posts dissecting popular games inspired by UserOnboard and Deconstructor of Fun. We aimed to combine their formats, offering insights to game developers and encouraging them to sign up for our beta.
UserOnboard creates engaging PowerPoint presentations that break down the onboarding journey of popular apps and websites2.
Deconstructor of Fun is one of the best educational gaming blogs and what taught me most of my initial game mechanic knowledge when I first entered the industry two years prior. Michail Katkoff writes engaging deep dives into the most popular games out there.
In our game dissections, we would identify what worked and where the app developer could improve. Whenever we mentioned improvement areas, we would link to our landing page and encourage them to sign up for our beta.
This content aimed to build credibility and generate warm leads for interviews and product development.
We thought five games would be decent and doable to give us enough traction. We decided on the most popular games at the time: Angry Birds 2, BlockIt, Crossy Road, Candy Crush Soda Saga, and Agar.io.
Has been another roller coaster day for Onboard. We found another direct competitor today, but it's not focused on games. We haven’t found many games with similar functionality. We’re wondering if that’s because they don’t know about it, the solutions aren’t good enough or or that they don’t want it.
Tomorrow’s the day where we go live. Thankfully, I’m supposed to feel nervous before a big day like this. Excited and unsure. There’s so many things we don’t have ready, and at the same time it doesn’t feel like Nicolaj and I are fully aligned on things.
The different things we are exploring and debating are:
1. Incentivized invites
2. GIF engagement
3. Knowledge of users and their network
But we know gaming! — Journal entry 2015-09-20
In times like these, it’s good to remember the famous quote from LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman:
"If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late."
While this wasn’t an actual product launch, it was the first time we said: “Hello world!” and lifted the curtains on what to come.
To start, we named the “product” “Onboard SDK” but later renamed it to the “Megacool SDK” to avoid confusion between our company and the product.
During the week of September 21, 2015, we had teed up a new blog post dissection to launch every day:
Each post had a version of the following CTA at the bottom:
To learn as much as possible about who signed up, in addition to creating some friction to avoid bots and random sign-ups, we asked why you wanted access to Onboard.
We’re live! It’s been a really good day with high focus, frustration, good discussions, table tennis and launch prep. My problem now is that we’re live, but we’re going to sleep.
Was it wise to push everything now? I wish I had more time to get feedback from externals, but at the same time I’m happy with where we’re starting out and drawing a line in the sand. — Journal entry 2015-09-21
We have five sign-ups! Two of them are randoms. None are outside our network. — Journal entry 2015-09-22
I like to work towards deadlines. We have produced a lot this week.
Fun with [friends from home] visiting. Reflected afterwards that it’s not really important that others outside our customer base “gets” what we’re doing or its potential. Like my parents and friends...
Onboard will be everything. At least if [the Israeli founder] gets it his way. He’s so engaged and nice. Gives so much of himself. If this goes well there will be so much to thank him for. It’s primarily thanks to him that we continued with this. — Journal entry 2015-09-23
Discussed focusing on GIFs or invites first.
We decided we’ll try to have as many meetings as possible from cold emails.
Our roller coaster mood went up once we noticed someone outside our network signed up.
Our personal evaluations4 are starting to get more “real” and brutal now that we’re working closer and closer and the “honeymoon phase” has past. — Journal entry 2015-09-24
Lots of roller coasters these days. Had personal evaluation and it was the most useful yet. .. Our biggest challenge is to find PmF.
Had an epiphany about how we until now have had very concrete things to do with the prototyping but now we’re in dev mode and forget to do retros5. We’re doing them again next week.
Can’t believe I’m meeting Andrew Chen6 tomorrow! Very excited. My goal is for him to want to follow our journey and hear more. — Journal entry 2015-09-25
Curious about the result from this “summary” post. I wonder if it will be good enough. — Journal entry 2015-09-28
On September 29th, we launched the summary post that pulled in all the main themes from the other blog posts: 26 Proven Growth Features That All App Developers Should Know About. The other posts were the warm-up. This was the post we hoped would gain us the most sign-up traction.
We launched the summary post today! It had more views than ‘Block It’ already within 5 hours of publishing! What are really people thinking? Is this important? How do we proceed from here? How do we handle potential demand? Will it move the needle? — Journal entry 2015-09-29
Find myself hitting refresh on our blog stats too often.
Really want to sit down and write more after yesterday’s workshop7. Thinking I should write about this journey and include my journal posts. — Journal entry 2015-10-01
[Gaming investor friend] didn’t seem too convinced on Onboard, but at the same time, they said we might just have the do-er mentality and grit to get it done. Realize I miss having something to show off8.
Had three meetings today where I gave everything. Everything to get those five meetings with game studios. We need to align on what we need to know to proceed with this.
Thrown so many lucky balls lately! I experienced lots of progress in the last few days. Soon, 2000 people have read what we’ve published. — Journal entry 2015-10-02
Our content marketing was live. Our landing page was live. Sign-ups were rolling in. We started to talk with warm potential customers.
Now, all we needed to figure out what we would build and how to do it. I was still not contributing to the development at the necessary speed. We needed additional technical wizardry to get our MVP out the door.
But how?
Would we make it in time for the YC deadline?
Continue reading the next part of the series here: How we built our co-founder team
A special thanks to who helped with invaluable feedback at the twelfth hour 🙏
We finally put our landing page wizardry to work, a skill honed through multiple previous hackathons.
Today, growth.design has become the best in class for this.
The Agar.io team made some changes based on our game dissection!
Today, Andrew is a gaming partner at Investor a16z. Back in 2015, he was a growth thought leader and writer. He hosted a breakfast gathering for a small group of makers to keep the pulse on what was moving and shaking. I had applied to attend a few months prior.
I had attended a writing workshop by The Hustle. I later published a popular story: The Secret: How to Write a Perfect Medium Post
It was so easy to pull out my phone and show Fun Run. I wish I could demo what we were doing just as easily.