A Pivot & Bootstrapping Story: 90K to 1.2M Visitors in One Year

Context: In 2019, I met Rostem Hairedin, an influential businessperson and serial entrepreneur. He had a startup operating in four countries but the company failed to sustain growth or generate revenue. Knowing about my attempts at 2 user-generated content platforms around 2010 and my experience in both product strategy and marketing, Rostem offered me a position as the head of product and asked me if I’d be willing to try bootstrapping Storia.

Problem: The company had burned through its resources and had an operating budget of less than 25K USD. Storia started as a more casual Medium but failed to attract users to generate content. The golden age of blogs and online listicle websites was long gone.

Actions: To turn the company around with an extremely small budget I had to make some hard decisions and find the most cost-effective ways to develop software, create content and promote the platform.

1. Researched user behavior, and content trends in the markets Storia operated. Analyzed Data from ~50.000 user-generated posts on local platforms
   • Understood categories and topics that got the most engagement
   • Calculated monetary value for posts, shares, likes, and comments based on the observed ratio between these user interactions and our in-house content generation costs
2. Shut down operations in Russia and the USA, kept Turkey and Brazil
3. Reduced the number of employees to the bare minimum
4. Crafted a new product strategy to turn Storia into a Reddit-like web platform for developing countries and got buy-in from major investors
5. Created a product roadmap, wireframes, and product requirements for the new Storia
6. Outsourced software development to a very affordable yet effective group of freelancers
7. Hired a content editor with his own network of part-time content creators in Turkey
8. Developed a ranking and points system based on prior user behavior and content research and implemented it as a major component of the platform.
9. Hired a freelancer content writer and a social media manager in Brazil
10. Built relationships with social media influencers that focused on sharing other people’s content
    • They were not attractive to other brands since they were not producing original content and weren’t able to generate income from their large follower base
    • This created an opportunity for us to boost our content extremely affordably
11. Hired a part-time community manager to engage with University students.

Timeline:

• I began the project in March 2019
• We soft-launched the new Storia in early October 2019.
• We generated some content in-house, tested the platform, and fixed bugs between October and late November 2019
• We started paid collaborations with influencers with high follower counts but low-to-no monetization options
• We experienced explosive growth between December 2019 and March 2020

Results: Following the website renewal, the company experienced:

• The number of users has grown 1,270.73% from 89K to 1.2 Million
• The pageviews have grown 4,571.88% from 200K to 9.3 Million
• Pages per session have grown 262.53% from 1.31 to 4.75
• Avg. Session Duration increased 117.60% from 50 seconds to 1 minute 50 seconds
• Direct traffic has grown by 464.53%
• Organic search has grown by 173.14%

Audience Overview Reports

Acquisition Channels Report

Conclusion

Storia was a huge learning experience and an exciting journey. Being able to leverage my Product Strategy, UX Design, and Data Analytics skills as well as utilizing my prior marketing experience made my job at Storia very fulfilling.

Being able to reach 1.2 million people per month and get 9.3 million pageviews while increasing session time and pages per session significantly with around 25K USD budget per month stands as a testament to the idea that constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention.

Unfortunately, by the time we started gaining traction, investors had already moved on and decided not to pursue the project further. I understand and respect their decisions since they have been investing in the project since 2015 and saw less-than-ideal returns. Nevertheless, the decision to shut down saddened me, because I truly believed the project had the potential to become one of the major user-generated content platforms in the developing world. I’m still grateful for the opportunity, my learnings and all the amazing people I met on the road.