The Krugle Case Study
More Customers, In Less Time, For Less Money - That's the bottom line on the Krugle launch.
Many of you have asked me where I was the last couple of months, so here it is. I took a 3 month contract to launch a company named Krugle - (no, it's not a German pastry-and yes, I tried to change the name as soon as I got there). I was the VP of Marketing, but "VP of the Launch" might have been more accurate - since that was the task at hand.
The Launch Highlights:
- 7 weeks from near zero to live stage launch
- DEMOgod Award
- Coverage in all targeted major technology press
- 35,000 Beta sign-ups in 11 weeks, 45% from off-shore
Krugle is a search engine for source code. Getting them launched was arguably the most successful launch I've been involved with - and certainly the most cost effective. This story makes a tasty case study in marketing in this new flat world, but for now, here's a top level description of events,
The project started on Dec 13th and ended March 13th.
One of the first orders of business was to create the overall brand look and feel. With no time to do a formal study, we brought in Ashton Abeck of San Francisco to crank out a series of "web 2.0" looking designs. In the end the search engine window would become the brand, but the search engine was not scheduled to be ready for several months, so we needed to come up with a temporary brand image and marketing presence to instill customer and investor confidence until the search engine was ready. We built a site in two weeks with the help of Brian McNitt cranking out the code
A New Way
From the onset, one of the goals was to launch this company in a new way, leveraging new mediums and methods - not relying on traditional marketing tools such as advertising or even PR. So, we knew we needed a blog. After some debate,we settled on a Wordpress blog template because we perceived using an open source solution would be important to our customers. The Krugle blog was, and is, masterfully managed, built, added to and watched over by Chris Locke. (thank you Chris), after we got a little top-level "how to" advice from blog masters Doc Searls and Shel Israel. 
We used DEMO as the launch platform, journalists on site to ignite the fire, and the blogosphere to spread the messages around the world.
DEMO, for those who don't know, is the one of the premiere venues for launching a new product. From the start-ups point of view, it's extremely efficient and cost effective, with a deep concentration of press and venture capitalists to make it worth your while.
Krugle CEO and Co-Founder, Steve Larsen, along with John Mitchell, Chief Architect, did an excellent job on stage of making a "search engine for code" look engaging- not that easy to do as a stage performance (watch the show). DEMO gives you six minutes to tell your story - it has to be live and it has to be good.
Much of the value of DEMO comes from the press. In Krugle's case it was the press that ignited the blog community, who in turn, spread the messages around the world. In particular, one of the first articles, by Dan Farber seemed to be most quoted in future blogs.
The effect of the press was nearly instant, with site and blog visits gaining momentum from the first hour of the show and continuing for several days.
The next major jump in activity after DEMO happened about a week later when Wired On-Line covered the product with a well written story by Dylan Tweney. The Wired article turned out to be more important than the launch event in terms of site and blog visits. It triggered slashdot activity which made for an active day.
It was the combination of exposures that launched Krugle into a number one spot on Technorati for the better part of a week, meaning Krugle was the most talked about topic in all the blogosphere during that time.
And why is all this traffic important to a company just announcinng a product with nothing to sell or even give away?
Beta sign-ups. The larger the list of signed-up, interested customers, the faster product propagtion upon availability.
The following slide shows the Beta program sign-ups from the web site. Notice the graph simularities to the blog visits.
So that's the short version of the Krugle launch, with the other interesting fact being how far and wide the messages were cast. Take a look at the clustrmap map which gives a reasonable estimation of where the blog activity and hence, Beta downloads were coming from:
I've been involved with hundreds of product and company launches, but this would be the first time I've seen a product reach so far with so little expense. The reach and velocity of the messages has to be attributed to the viral nature of blogs, "friends telling friends " about a product or service they might find interesting.
Hi Don,
This a really great post. We're planning to launch an online service like this as well. Great outline. If you don't mind sharing how many people in total you had working on this I'd love to know!
Keep up the great work! I think Krugle is a really interesting service:)
Posted by: Andre Charland | March 30, 2006 at 05:03 PM