Ya’ll ready for the latest conspiracy theory generated by the intarwebz:
SubliminalClub’s meteoric rise in popularity isn’t the result of the tireless efforts of myself and @Fire (who often works 16 hour days to get new titles out). Instead, it’s because we’re running subliminals from our competitors?
lol.
We’ve been asked many times how we managed to “come out of nowhere” and start eating up market share and to those who aren’t familiar with business principles, it seems a lot more “magical” than it really is. My past two day jobs have been leadership positions in startups (one digital media, one SaaS), so the real drivers of our growth came from the lessons I learned there. I’ve detailed this multiple times on this very journal, but I guess it’s much more exciting to go with the espionage / sabotage narrative.
But again, here’s one of the “secrets.” From: http://theleanstartup.com/principles
"Too many startups begin with an idea for a product that they think people want. They then spend months, sometimes years, perfecting that product without ever showing the product, even in a very rudimentary form, to the prospective customer. When they fail to reach broad uptake from customers, it is often because they never spoke to prospective customers and determined whether or not the product was interesting. When customers ultimately communicate, through their indifference, that they don’t care about the idea, the startup fails…
A core component of Lean Startup methodology is the build-measure-learn feedback loop. The first step is figuring out the problem that needs to be solved and then developing a minimum viable product (MVP) to begin the process of learning as quickly as possible. Once the MVP is established, a startup can work on tuning the engine. This will involve measurement and learning and must include actionable metrics that can demonstrate cause and effect question."
To summarize that, we built a basic product that people wanted, then we created a process to observe how our customers respond to new titles. Mix that with the sales numbers, and what you have is a solid model of what works and what doesn’t work. Focus your time only on what works, hype builds because you’re consistently dropping titles that resonates with your customer and VOILA! You have a successful startup.
Yes, obviously, there’s more to it when you break it all down (not to mention, scaling is a much harder, more involved issue), but the overall strategy is simple to understand, no conspiracy theories needed.
If you’re interested in starting a business with an original product, you NEED TO READ The Lean Startup. It’s literally a blueprint to understanding whether your business with be a success or not.