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Researched profile. Starter Story's AI research system compiled this page from 26 public sources — the founder didn't write it. Automated research can misread or misattribute a source, so treat figures as best-effort. How this works →
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How GMass Grew

Email campaign and mail merge tool that works inside Gmail

How did GMass grow?

Summary of the sourced claims below

Public accounts describe early visibility coming from being a Chrome extension listed on the Chrome Web Store, which brought 50 to 60 signups a day, along with a Product Hunt launch and Reddit posts. Pay-per-click advertising was described as a major growth channel, first on Overture before Google AdWords, and paid search was later described as a valuable channel once it was refined. Publishing blog content that answered user questions was described as bringing organic search traffic, with many articles ranking well without targeting specific keywords.

Channels

10 channels · grouped by how GMass grows

  • Reddit

    · 2 mentions
    “So in the beginning, it was some Product Hunt action, some Reddit action, being featured by some bloggers, and then some visibility.”
    high
    Show 1 more quote
    “I then posted it to Reddit’s /r/startups subreddit, got it featured on Product Hunt, and got it listed on the Chrome Web Store.”
    high

  • Product Hunt

    · 2 mentions · 2 sources
    “I launched it on Product Hunt, actually. This was now September 2015 we're talking about. And it was received pretty well. For someone who was an unknown Product Hunt user who didn't have a substantial following, it got a decent amount of upvotes. I think back in those days, it was getting a new ...”
    high
    Show 1 more quote
    “about 100,000 people have requested invites, and supposedly after this week, all 100,000 people will have had the opportunity to sign up ... Every new user also gets a few invites to hand out”
    medium

  • Pay Per Click Advertising

    · 2 mentions
    “my growth for Django mail was fueled entirely by pay per click advertising. And so this was before there was Facebook ads. And before there was Twitter ads, this was actually you if you are old enough to recall a platform called overture, overture was the original pay per click search model even ...”
    high
    Show 1 more quote
    “The #2 thing is finding someone that’s actually good at paid search. ... Once I found someone with the expertise to continually test and refine the ads until we got the results we wanted, it proved to be a valuable channel. Nowadays I spend $20K+/month on ads, and it is indeed fruitful.”
    high

  • Organic social media

    · 2 mentions · 2 sources
    “And then a couple bloggers picked it up. I was on a couple of podcasts, and the ball got rolling from there.”
    high
    Show 1 more quote
    “Every couple of years, a new-fangled email service launches and generates a lot of buzz on Twitter and in the tech press. The latest app is called Hey, made by Basecamp...”
    medium

  • Content marketing

    · 1 mention
    “we've also written tons and tons of content. that answers every question we can possibly think of that a user would have. And so what we do is when somebody asks a question that we don't have a canned response for, then I'll write an article answering that. So hopefully the next time somebody has...”
    high

  • SEO

    · 1 mention
    “The #1 thing that has worked has been publishing content to my blog. In the beginning, I didn’t take a data-driven approach to write. I wrote what I thought would be useful to people. ... a lot of that content, despite not targeting any specific keyword, started ranking and continues to rank well...”
    high

  • Waitlist

    · 1 mention
    “According to Jason Fried, about 100,000 people have requested invites, and supposedly after this week, all 100,000 people will have had the opportunity to sign up. ... Every new user also gets a few invites to hand out, so let’s say at the end of this week, a total of 80,000 people have signed up...”
    medium

  • Press

    · 1 mention
    “The amount of publicity this battle is generating is insane. Every tech site you can think of is covering the story from TechCrunch to The Verge to protocol. ... they’ve just earned another round of major press coverage from every. publication. on. Earth.”
    medium

  • Leveraging existing platforms

    · 1 mention
    “Google gives you some visibility just for being a Chrome extension. So you get visibility on the Chrome extension store, which is officially called the Chrome Web Store. And that was enough to bring in 50 to 60 signups a day.”
    high

  • Guest posts

    · 1 mention
    “in the beginning, it was some Product Hunt action, some Reddit action, being featured by some bloggers, and then some visibility.”
    high

How 3,017 businesses grow

Of businesses with mapped growth channels, the share using each — GMass’s highlighted.
  • Referral/Word-of-mouth
    67%
  • Social media
    63% ◀
  • Search/SEO
    58% ◀
  • Email
    48%
  • Community
    37% ◀
  • Content/Inbound
    35% ◀
  • Partnerships
    33%
  • Events
    25%
  • Paid ads
    24% ◀
  • Outbound/Sales
    19%
  • Press/PR
    18% ◀
  • Marketplaces/App stores
    11% ◀
  • Podcasting
    4%
  • Building in public
    3%
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