Independent music service hypetree launched their product at $0.03 cost per conversion.
Plugging into the 1+ billion referrals StumbleUpon drives each month, many brands have found success with Paid Discovery in launching new products and campaigns with StumbleUpon. The story of fresh New York City startup hypetree, however, embodies the power of the SU community for marketers. Launching in early October, their use of Paid Discovery drove results that surpassed their monthly expectations within the first week.
hypetree’s Launch Landing Page
A Startup for Independent Music
A few years ago, Alex Mitchell, co-founder of hypetree, learned the difficulties of being discovered as an independent musician in New York City. Recording and distributing music without a label proved to be a saturated market. He was perplexed by how there could be such a strong community of people who want to discover new music, but no effective outlets for bringing them together.
Earlier in 2011, he and a couple of friends, Michelle Panzironi, Trevor Collins, and Ben Sklovsky, banded together to answer the question: how can you connect independent musicians with the crowd of people who love label-free tunes? Alex and his friends built hypetree, a tool which compares the music of two different independent bands, prompting the music fan to choose the tune which strikes their fancy more.
Rather than focus on a single rating, the hypetree team found that the independent music fans preferred making the selection of which song they preferred.
“We’re just nerdy musicians who love the Internet,” says Mitchell. Their passion went into building their first product, but the team was stuck with an issue all new products face: how would indie music fans discover their service?
A Memorable Product Launch
Starting in October, the hypetree team looked to build sign-ups for a beta version of their product. The goal was to get about 1,000 users for their first product launch by highlighting the value of their product. Enter: StumbleUpon.
Stumblers loved hypetree's campaign, which averaged about a 90% positive rating, generating 100 times as much free traffic as paid!
In his other day job, Alex focuses on working with media clients, which meant that hypetree’s launch took the traditional paths online: search, display and social. Going out on a limb, hypetree decided to try Paid Discovery as well. The results turned out to be rather unexpected for the hypetree team.
Driving Results with StumbleUpon
“Our StumbleUpon campaign worked so overwhelmingly well that we exceeded our month goal within the first day,” explains Mitchell. “Our campaign was designed to spread awareness of our product across several ad platforms in an attempt to get at least 1,000 people to sign up for our beta in the first month.”
After applying the targeting for the StumbleUpon community which would respond best, Music and Indie Music, hypetree learned about the market demand for their product. The demand was so high that over 6,000 people signed up for the beta of hypetree within the first week of the campaign! This yielded a total cost of 3 cents per new user coming from StumbleUpon alone.
Hypetree learned the hard way that you never know when your content will go viral — one of the joys of launching a startup. The traffic was so strong that it crashed hypetree’s servers. “We were on a server with limited resources before because we didn’t think we’d be getting this level of traffic for months,” said Mitchell.
Campaign Details
After running for 7 days, the hypetree campaign found success across both paid and organic routes. Below are a few of the key stats from the first 7 days of the hypetree launch with Paid Discovery.
Targeting: Music, Indie Music, Internet, Internet Tools
Demographic: M & F | 13 – 45 | USA
Total Visits: 180,000+
Paid Visits: 2,500
Earned Visits: 179,000+
Total Sign Ups: 6,000+
Campaign Score: 90% (average is 75%)
Total Investment: $125
Cost per Conversion: 3¢
According to Michelle Panzironi, head of Operations & Marketing for hypetree and long-time StumbleUpon user, “StumbleUpon is a great advertising platform because it puts your content right in front of the user. It’s not just about getting clicks, it’s about winning the user over with your content.” (Thanks, Michelle.)
This is a promising start for hypetree. We at Paid Discovery wish them the best of luck and are glad that we could connect them with their target audience. There is an audience for every advertiser with Paid Discovery, and we look forward to sharing these success stories with you.
Stumble On!
Jack Krawczyk
Senior Product Marketing Manager