How To Build a World Class Referral Program, With Real Code

This blog post is about how we used YesGraph to build a referral program into YesGraph. Our goal is to show you how easy it can be to get started with referrals. It literally took just a few hours.

We’re still writing the post, more soon!


 

We actually launched our referral program and used this blog post as a product spec. We’re linking to this Github repo with the relevant code snippets.

Program Design

A lot of thought can be put into viral flows. Embedding a YouTube video and syndicating an Instagram photo to Facebook is a form of virality. It’s not just Dropbox extra-space campaigns.

But don’t make perfect the enemy of the good here: just get started. So the program is simple: if you share your invite link with someone who then subscribes to YesGraph, you’ll get a $100 Amazon gift card.

There is a lot to optimize about this: timing, value, positioning, and more. But to get started, you can keep it simple.

Referral Tracking

Tracking invites is really easy. You want to create a referral code, unique per user. Put that code in a link that the user can share, and on that link put a registration page that connects the new user signup with the inviter.

Sometimes you want to attach additional data to the referral link. This can be done with UTM params, or by implementing your tracking code to have additional data. In the table below, we add a placement parameter, which records the prompt that brought the user to the page to send referrals.

Field

Type

Value

Example

referral_code string the unique tracking code 314159
user_id int the user ID associated with this code 1337
placement string how the user got to the referral page lifecycle_email

So when a user shares an invite, the URL might look like: example.com/refer/314159

[See the code on github here].(# link to github)

 

Recording Referrals & Rewards

Separate from the referral code, you want to track activity. The basic level is recording when someone signs up with a referral code.

You also probably want to grant rewards to people that received invites but signed up directly with their email and didn’t use the referral code on signup. This is going to be a support issue, where your support team will need to respond to people asking for rewards in this case.

You also might have a reward criteria. In our case, it’s when someone subscribes. So there is already a funnel forming that we’ll want to track: invite sent, referral signup, subscribed.

Field

Type

Value

Example

referral_code string the unique tracking code 314159
inviter_user_id int the user ID associated with this code 1337
status string the state of the referral “invite sent”  or “referral signup” or “subscribed”
invitee_email string the email of the invitee bob@bobsburgers.com
invitee_user_id int the user id of the new invited user 4242
created_at date when this record was created 11/5/2016
reward_granted_at date when the reward was granted, NULL if not granted 11/15/2016

[See the code on github here].(# link to github)

Invite Channels With YesGraph

We want to add every reasonable invite channel on our referral program. YesGraph makes that really easy with literally a single line of code. We actually use this on multiple parts of the site, including when users invite their team.

We configure parts of it on YesGraph’s dashboard, like setting the referral link pattern. Other parts can be configured on the front end.

<span id="yesgraph" 
    class="yesgraph-invites" 
    data-app="4319467e-91f9-4b60-a747-a8eb20c7dedc">
</span>

screenshot-2016-11-25-16-37-30

Go to the referral page here, which directly shows the code used to make that page.

Referral Email

The email sent to a referral invitee is very important. Opening, clicking, and signing up are the last steps in the funnel to get a new user. So there is a lot to optimize here.

But at the start, just make sure you write something clear and brief. Explain why your product is valuable and make a clear call to action.

Here is where we start:

Building a Great Referral Program: Minimal Effort for Maximum Results

Adding a referral program to your B2B product can be daunting because there is just so much to learn and try. We’re obsessed with great referral programs at YesGraph, so we put together a quick guide to get started.

Metrics

Let’s start with how to keep score. You want more users and more revenue. The input is your current users base. So think about the metrics model for how this happens. Here is how I like to model it:

  • Existing users: your current user who will invite new users
  • Participation: the percentage of your current users participating in your referral program at a given time.
  • Spread: the average number of invites a participating user sends.
  • Conversion: the number of new users generated per invite.

When you map out these metrics, you can measure your overall virality and each step in the funnel.

metrics

Now let’s take each step of the funnel and break down how to drive good performance here.

Basic Tracking & Referrals Springboard

You need to create a way to track referrals. It can be as simple as an invite link that includes the inviters user id. Make a dedicated referrals landing page.

This way you can focus and track your efforts. Get users to the referrals page, get users to invite lots of contacts, and ensure those contacts convert with a dedicated referral signup and onboarding experience.

Participation: Tell Users to Share

The biggest blind spot in referral programs is the percentage of users who are prompted to make referrals. You should think about marketing your referral program the same way you think about another product feature like photo sharing or comments.

  • Onboard new users into the referral program.
  • If someone hasn’t sent referrals, explain the value over email.
  • Test multiple points of entry throughout your product into the referral program.
  • Send status updates about past referrals to get more downstream activity.

Spread: Use YesGraph to add every important channel

On your referrals page, you want to include every reasonable sharing channel:

  • social
  • email
  • link sharing
  • contact importing

The best referral programs like Airbnb and Dropbox all include these channels.

referrals

The good news is that you can include them with almost no engineering with YesGraph’s web sharing tools. It’s literally a single line of code to start, and completely customizable.
yesgraph-superwidget-demo

Convert: Find the right people

Sales teams at B2B companies know the importance of finding the decision makers at companies matching a refined ideal customer profile.

YesGraph can recommend the right users to invite by targeting these decision makers by job title, company size, and dozens of other features. We do this by enriching millions of contacts using multiple data services and targeting the right contacts in real time. The best part is that this requires no additional engineering on your part. Read more about our targeting here.

We also recommend creating a dedicated landing page for referral invites. This was you can add social proof, including things like the inviter’s profile picture. At the start, just make sure to directly track your referral conversion from invite email to signup separately from your other acquisition channels.

So Much More

There is a lot of depth to referrals in B2B use cases. This post tries to outline how to get started with minimal engineering. If you’re considering using YesGraph and want some help getting setup with referrals, get in touch!

To find out more, head over to YesGraph and request a demo.

Get future updates on our blog here.

 

 

Announcing YesGraph’s B2B Referrals with Intelligent Contact Targeting

Driving growth is all about quantitatively improving your product. At YesGraph we strive to make that easier by doing the heavy lifting for social flows. We recommend exactly who users should invite to boost the performance of invite flows.

Today we’re announcing some amazing new tools and a new focus: B2B.

We’ve found the best signal in the context of products designed for companies.

For collaborative products, YesGraph helps users invite the right coworkers. When your users onboard their teams, they activate at a higher rate, subscribe, and grow revenue.

For referrals, YesGraph helps users invite contacts who are decision makers matching your ideal customer profile. When your users refer the right contacts, you improve acquisition metrics and grow revenue.

Here is how our processing pipeline helps boost performance, with more details on how it works below.

screenshot-2016-11-08-11-07-24

Target the Right Contacts

The most amazing part is how little engineering is required. First you add our web invite widget using literally a single line of code.

screenshot-2016-11-08-11-14-47

This adds every important invite channel to your flow: email, social, link sharing, and contact importing for bulk email.

YesGraph recommends the right contacts after the user imports an email address book. This is set on our targeting dashboard. For example, we can target by role:

targeting-by-role

You can also compare the performance of different targeting configurations. For example: compare targeting those roles in small and large companies:

trargeting-allocation

Test Quickly and Often

This is great for growth teams because, like Optimizely, YesGraph can add a new channel to run frequent tests with very little engineering work.

The best growth teams track not just the impact of their experiments but many tests they run. Pure velocity.

We take care of the hard parts like indexing millions of emails, enriching across multiple data services, filtering the noise like craigslist emails, applying ranking in real time, measuring the impact of your testing, and dozens of other details that would distract your engineers from your core product.

To find out more, go to YesGraph and request a demo.

Get future updates on our blog here.

YesGraph’s 1st Business Hire

We’re hiring for a business role. This post describes the product we’re building and the opportunity for the role.

Summary:

  • YesGraph helps drive growth using social data
  • We’re a team of 5 focused on product & engineering
  • This is our first non-technical hire
  • We’re looking help with sales process, data partnerships, and more
  • Watch our YC Demo day pitch!

I include the video below which includes our YC S16 demo day pitch! If you want to apply or refer a friend, just email me: ivan@yesgraph.com.

Screenshot 2016-09-05 12.32.45

YesGraph helps apps grow with social data.

We help parse and rank user contacts like emails and phone number to recommend who the user should invite for collaboration or a referral. This can help an invite flow drive higher performance, boosting acquisition and retention.

Under the hood, we use machine learning over a huge volume of social graph data to understand the world. We start with contacts data like names, emails, and phone numbers, and enrich and expand the data from the web and social media.

Our ambition is to map every human relationship on the planet. Literally everyone. Our product has an incredible data network effect where the more customers we add, the more data we see, the more insight we can derive, and the greater performance we drive.

We’re looking for our first business hire.

We’ve tested some ideas and we need help answering lots of big questions. Here are just a few.

Sales Process

We’ve done some outbound sales emails, but we need to scale. We need to experiment with lead sourcing, positioning, and process. We can explain YesGraph in a few paragraphs, but how do we distill a brief message? How do we incorporate feedback from customers into our sales process and messaging?

In building our core data product, we’ve begun to build up a model of every company in the world. How can we leverage this model in our sales?

Product Teardowns

Our team can help companies grow with industry best practices. Check out the teardown of Telegram below.

How should we scale this service? How can it be incorporated into our SaaS sales process? This is great content, so how do we balance the marketing potential?

Growth Class & Paid Acquisition

We have a successful blog focusing on growth and analytics. We also wrapped up some extra content into a paid class: learn.yesgraph.com.

Like the growth teardown services, how do we connect our SaaS sales to this training? What is the right sales process for leads from the blog and the class? How should we scale paid acquisition to the class?

Data Partnerships

YesGraph’s core product involves getting social graph data from customers and trying to make sense of it. We’re already using a few data sources to enrich this core data.

When should we scale vendors into partners? Are there any sales targets that are actually better positioned as data partnerships? What data sources are we missing?

By the way, if you got this far, ask about brown m&ms when we meet.

Real Ownership

There is so much opportunity here. This means we want you to really own this.

That means you’ll get significant stock. It also means sovereignty — freedom to take on and master these challenges.

YesGraph offers benefits like health insurance, great food, flexible schedules, a killer computer, and more.


If you want to apply or refer a friend, just email me: ivan@yesgraph.com.

Screenshot 2016-09-05 12.32.45

Boost B2B Team Onboarding with Domain Targeting

We’re announcing something new today to make it much easier to help B2B companies onboard teams of users.

There is a trend of consumerization of IT. In SaaS, that often means consumer quality design and user experience. We keep our ear to the ground with growth communities, and more companies building B2B apps are using consumer tactics to drive metrics improvements.

Teams matter a lot for collaborative B2B products. Like a small social network, there is a network effect where a few users engaging in an app together will be retained at a far higher rate than those that don’t.

To help with B2B invite flows, we’ve added Domain Targeting to our Superwidget web invite flow. With a single line of code, you can allow the user to import their email address book. Then YesGraph will suggest contacts on their work email domain.

domain-targeting

If you already have an invite flow, you can just add our contact importing to your existing flow. The Superwidget can manage the whole flow, or be used as an add on. Just the contact importing looks like this:

Screenshot 2016-07-01 09.06.03

We manage the whole auth flow too – again with one line of code. To learn more, head over to our docs pages to learn about domain targeting and contact importers.

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The Top 6 Tactics to Hire a Growth Team

Hiring for your growth team can be really hard. Part of the problem is that the role covers a bunch of skills, and a little bit of magic. Let’s demystify it.

This is actually part of a longer lecture in our premium growth class. Check out the lecture here.

1. Start With Your Team

You need to understand how this growth role is going to fit in with the rest of your team. This varies by company size and how you normally make decisions. One factor is whether you have a dedicated growth team vs growth managers distributed. This affects who owns the metrics and how you decide who works on what.

2. Understand the Skills

Your growth team members will not be searching for silver bullets. They’ll be grinding away on lots of lead bullets. So what skills will they need? CRO, SEM, SEO, SQL, BBQ, ASO, PR, viral, PPC, PBJ, referrals, partnerships — the list is very long and confusing. I’m 80% sure some of these acronyms are just made up.

Identify the areas you’ll need eventually and what you’ll need right away.

bruce

3. Match with Candidate Experience

The #1 mistake in growth is thinking something can come and solve all your problems. This thinking infects hiring for growth: we need someone who can do it all and has done it before. The problem is that the best people are probably not hirable by your young company.

Match up the skills you need with the experience you want to find. So you’re probably not hiring a growth manager — you’re hiring a marketing or product manager — or maybe an engineer. The career of a growth manager follows this T-Shape, going deep in a specific set of skills built upon a broad base of skills.

tshaped

Understanding this will help you find folks with the right experience for the things they must know right away.

4. Real Assessment Tests

The best way to assess someone for a role is to test the specific skills you’re going to ask them to do in that role. The best assessments are real world problems. You can create realistic toy problems and see how different candidates compare. In engineering, we found that ditching traditional white-board interviews dramatically increased the quality of our interview process.

The specific tests should be based on the skills you need.

Another real-world test is asking people about the experience they say they have. Ask deeper and deeper questions until you run into the bound of their knowledge. This will probably surpass your own knowledge, so this tests their ability to communicate complex ideas

Listen to Elon Musk on the topic.

When you struggle with a problem, that’s when you understand it. If someone was really the person that solved it. They’ll be able to answer multiple levels. They’ll be able to go down to brass tacks. And if they weren’t, they’ll get stuck. Anyone who struggled really hard with a problem never forgets it.

screens

5. Background Experience

The previous roles will matter for growth because of the mix of skills — marketing, product, and engineering. PMs might not be technical enough but are typically good at running a process. Engineers can go deep into technical knowledge, but make sure the engineer is hungry to put numbers on the wall. Marketers sometimes suffer from magical thinking and aren’t technical enough, but skills like explaining a product simply are underrated. Assess the expected strengths and weaknesses from the experience.

By the way, startup founders regardless of background are often great growth managers because they have practice being relentlessly resourceful.

6. Ask the Experts

Talking to other growth leaders will help you better understand what to do for your hiring. Focus on people whose companies need to apply the skills you think you need.

We interviewed a few of the best growth folks with experience from companies like Airbnb and twitter. Find the full lecture on the topic in our growth course here.

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The Quickest Way to Understand VC

Raising Venture Capital for your startup looks like an insider’s game from the outside. It isn’t clear how to get into this network. Once you pitch, it’s unclear on what it takes to convince someone to invest.

There are lots of tactics to discuss here, but there is a very common misunderstanding about how VCs actually work.

How Normal Works

First, let’s talk about a normal investment. This might be a public stock or a house.

You want to minimize risk. You don’t want to lose your money. Ideally, you make a 5%+ annual return and go away happy. Here is what that looks like for a rising housing market where some houses do a bit better.

Screenshot 2016-04-14 14.27.52

If you ask a normal person what a good investment looks like, they might describe a very high likelihood to return your money and make a bit more.

You can see this in aggregate too, in terms of economic growth rates. Look at all those single digits.

gdp growth

The problem is that VCs aren’t normal. So stop thinking like you’re pitching a normal investor.

Abnormal Returns: Power Laws

If you took a VCs entire portfolio of investments, and sorted them by the return on investment, what would that look like?

The secret is that half of the total returns probably came from their single best investment. That investment might have returned 100X the original investment. So compare that 5% to this 10,000% (over a few years).

Then, of the remaining portfolio, another half came from the next two top investments. Here is what that looks like.

Screenshot 2016-04-14 14.28.00

There are a few things to notice about this graph.

First, the length of the tail of failed investments doesn’t matter. VCs can lose all their money in an investment, and it doesn’t matter for their fund.

Second, the height of the top few investments will determine the returns for the whole portfolio. VCs must be in the best deals, or they won’t make money as a fund.

The fear of missing that top deal is real. Let’s add a big missed deal to the graph above to compare the cost:

Screenshot 2016-04-15 09.53.05

Not By Choice

I used to think this setup was weird. Why don’t VCs shoot for a higher average return with a higher win rate but a lower variance?

The interesting thing about these power law returns is that you don’t make them entirely by choice. If you pick investments with some thesis, and sort your returns, they’ll look like this shape. I think this has to do with the way technology helps create defensible businesses to the exclusion of other companies.

Ignoring the shape of these returns isn’t optional.

Downstream Behavior Explained

Knowing this helps explain so much of a VC’s behavior.

They aren’t looking for a guaranteed $1M, they want a *chance* at $1B or $100B. This is really weird, because software business that are profitable might not be fundable.

Investments that go to zero don’t matter. VCs would rather swing for the fences and strike out. Practically, after a VC invests, they’ll care about getting the money back. But this isn’t going to make or break their fund.

Missing the top is the main risk for a VC. It’s an opportunity cost. That is a powerful idea because you can position your company appropriately knowing this.

This also explain why deals get hot. VCs think that a competing firm knows something they don’t. They aren’t punished for a deal going to zero, but they’ll suffer if they miss out on the head of this power law.

The reverse is also true, with cold deals that can’t seem to close. You’d think VCs are independent thinkers, but the lack of interest from other VCs can really hurt your fundraising.

Another thing that happens with these returns is that they are by definition exceptional. So there is shockingly little data on what makes the best deals. This is really tricky because you’re looking for what the best deals looked like when the companies were just getting started. The result seems to be a lot of ink spilt on signals that are probably noise.

So if you’re pitching VCs, don’t focus on the immediate profit you can make. Focus on how there is a chance you’re going to make a home run. Talk to a bunch of firms in parallel to create a fear of missing out. Traction to date matters, and so does selling your vision for the future.

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Social Networks vs User Acquisition – or – How I Learned To Love Email and SMS

Facebook connect is awesome. Your app gets all your user’s friends.

Right? Wrong.

Somehow a year after the change, app developers don’t understand the data they get from Facebook connect.

ride the bomb

Start with a History Lesson.

In the early Web 2.0 days of Plaxo, LinkedIn, and thefacebook.com, contact importers were killer. Users would import their whole address books and send everyone an invite. Back then, getting an email to a new service was interesting, so the conversion rates for bulk uploads weren’t terrible.

Then starting in 2007, Facebook opened up their platform. This meant that apps could have users send requests to friends right on Facebook. The Facebook platform was a viable user acquisition channel.

You might remember this as a really shitty user experience. No I don’t want a fucking tractor in Farmville, Bob from high school — we haven’t spoken in years.

This was really, really effective to get lots of users to apps. Apps that focused on a great user experience and solid retention did especially well. The requests doubled as a re-engagement mechanism to get users back into the app, boosting acquisition and retention.

Then in 2009 Facebook decided to pull back from this. I worked at Facebook at the time, and it was a clusterfuck. The request channel no longer as permissive, no little red jewels catching your eye. Large networks like Zynga were already popular, but new apps couldn’t rely on users aggressively inviting friends through Facebook.

Meanwhile, Dropbox’s referral program was setting a good example of another way to get users. Email was the most popular channel. Dropbox built an amazing app where people wanted to tell their friends, and the referral program just made it easy and incentivized.

In 2010, Facebook launched a “Like” button. This meant liked apps could put content in a user’s newsfeed to re-engage the user. Plus syndicating when a user liked something meant friends would see it. Both are weaker forms of the request channel, but offered the same benefits to growth marketers. Most people still don’t understand like buttons and assume a like is as valuable as, say, an email on a list. It isn’t.

Then in 2011 Facebook announced a general version of like with “social graph actions”. Any app could compose a sentence like “[User] [verbed] [noun]”. This was most striking with video, as in “Ivan watched Fail Compilation on SocialCam”. That activity was syndicated to the Facebook News Feed, and apps could acquire huge volumes of users. Those users would have “Instant Connect” so they’d be signed in to a Facebook experience just by visiting the site.

Literally millions of users could be acquired in a weekend. See stories like this one.

This turned out to be like friend requests: spammy in the newsfeed. So Facebook giveth, and taketh away, and just lowered the ranking of these open graph actions in the feed. Suddenly the acquisition channel dried up. SocialCam sold early but Viddy fell from a high valuation. Apps like Pinterest still benefit greatly from open graph actions (“Mary Pinned this Cupcake Recipe”), but you don’t hear about this as a user acquisition channel much anymore.

Around the same time, Twitter had a developer platform too. Twitter is awkward for acquisition no matter the channel (see below). Twitter also didn’t know whether they wanted a developer platform or not. In the early days, devs picked up the slack on the platform. I was there, with my last startup Tipjoy in 2008, an early Twitter app that powered payments and social charity.

By 2011, they didn’t like devs anymore. Now they want them again, and are building up their platform again with Fabric.

In April 2015, the Facebook platform shifted again: users that connect to apps through Facebook wouldn’t share their friends list. It would be limited to friends who are already on the app. This is fine for connecting with friends — great for engagement. But it cuts off the acquisition channel entirely. Shockingly, most apps I talk to don’t even know this is the case yet even after a year.

LinkedIn, never a friendly platform to begin with, cut off all access to user contacts. LinkedIn’s single utility is as a professional rolodex, but they decided users couldn’t take that rolodex elsewhere.

Decisions like this should make you take pause when you hear about a new platform. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn loved when apps built better experiences on their platforms… until they didn’t. Don’t bet your company on transient platforms.

The latest news is Facebook’s Messenger Platform. It sounds like a cool way for companies to communicate with users. I wouldn’t bet on it being a way for users to invite new users. Or as a way to message potentially new users. If you’re a bot company, it might be cool, but they are moving slowly on distribution because the experience with most bots is atrocious today.

What Works Today?

Facebook

Facebook is excellent for getting a social graph on your app, if all your users connect with Facebook. Posting to the Facebook feed is ok, but the ranking for your posts might be poor. Facebook app invites aren’t effective compared to a simple mobile address book contacts list. It’s doubtful Facebook Messenger will repeat the mistakes of Facebook Friend Requests.

Twitter

Twitter is awkward regardless of their developer policy. What is the exact invite flow?

  • Post a tweet, but that might be buried fast. This is the best option.
  • Send a DM, but that might be seen as spammy. No one has done this effectively.
  • In a tweet you can @reply, but that is limited and also potentially spammy.

LinkedIn

The best apps on LinkedIn today aren’t on their platform. They are asking users to export their contact list as a CSV and upload to their site. This is a pretty laborious flow for users. Posting to LinkedIn’s feed is ok, but the engagement there is very poor.

Pinterest & Instagram

These are photo based services, so it’s all about posting content. Pinterest is getting better at smarter pins. I think this will be their business model, so the platform seems more solid. Instagram is so focused on quality photos, that the best acquisition channel is (sadly) ads. That might be true for the Facebook feed too.

Email & Mobile Address Book

My favorite social network is also permissionless. There is no platform to lock down email contact importing and a mobile address book. There still debatable aspect — like are SMSs sent from the native composer or server side?

It’s important to recognize the biggest growth stories today, Mobile Messaging like WhatsApp, are built on this platform. This permissionless growth is why Facebook needed to pay up.

This is why we focus on these channels at YesGraph. It isn’t just about knowing which friends to invite, it’s also about having a channel where users can actually send those messages.

If you’re interested in learning more about viral growth, sign up for YesGraph here.

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How to Get an Email Intro

People routinely ask for intros the wrong way.

The first problem is many people don’t understand the etiquette. Busy people need to opt-in to an intro. If you just fire off an intro to both parties, what happens if the recipient doesn’t have interest or time? It’s awkward to reject the request and waste’s everyone’s time. 

So asking for an intro means you need to assume the person making the intro is going to ask the recipient first, the double opt-in.

Even knowing this, another mistake is not making this whole process easy. You need to make an intro request that can be forwarded to get the opt-in.

So here is how to write a right intro request that can be forwarded, with examples.

Let’s assume Nick has a startup, SnapBots, and wants an intro to Roy at Bloomberg Beta, one of YesGraph’s awesome investors.

The overall flow works like this:

  • Nick wants an intro to Roy 
  • Nick emails Ivan, asking for the intro
  • Ivan forwards the email to Roy, adding context
  • Roy replies, with yes or no
  • If yes, Ivan adds Nick to the thread with Roy
  • If no, Ivan replies to Nick saying no go

The start of this thread should include:

  • Who you want to get introduced
  • Context on who you or your company are
  • The goal of the introduction

Here is what that email might look like:

letterhead

 

Subject: Intro SnapBots to Roy at Bloomberg Beta

Body:
Hi Ivan,

Thanks for the feedback about SnapBots!

I noticed that Roy at Bloomberg Beta is an investor in YesGraph. Can you introduce us? I put more context below.

Thanks,
Nick
Cofounder, SnapBots

SnapBots has developed the markov block chain, which automatically generates disappearing chat bot signatures. We’ve grown 10% WoW for the last 5 weeks. We’re looking to raise a pre-seed round.

When forwarding, it’s really easy to add context for the recipient.

letterhead

 

Subject: fwd: Intro SnapBots to Roy at Bloomberg Beta

Body:
Hi Roy,

Nick is awesome. His company SnapBots is growing fast. ???

Can I intro?
Ivan

[the forwarded email]

This is great for Roy because he can see the original context and the judgement of a trusted contact.

This is also highly parallelizable, which is awesome for those seeking many introductions. If you’re fundraising, that’s crucial. But that’s for a future post. Subscribe to future posts here.

If you can’t get enough intro email advice, read what VCs Alex Iskold, Fred Wilson, and Roy Bahat have to say about it.

Superwidget: Build a Web Invite Flow in Minutes

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve launched our drop-in web invite flow, Superwidget.

You can add a Dropbox-style referral flow to your app with literally one line of code. Like this:

superwidget code

This will load an invite flow that allows for every reasonable invite channel:

  • Email invites
  • Bulk contact importer
  • Directly copying the link
  • Social sharing with Facebook and Twitter

Screenshot 2016-03-16 15.43.36

It turns out every good referral program has these same features. The reason is that they perform well together, giving users control and apps great performance.

referrals

This is awesome because Superwidget manages everything, you don’t need to worry about the specifics of our API. We’ll track invites sent and user machine learning to recommend contacts to invite from imported contacts.

Contact importers are awesome because selecting an email is so much easier than typing it in. YesGraph makes contact importers go in overdrive by recommending invites. So many users like our recommendations that selecting automatically will increase invites sent by 300%.

contact importer

The normal growth hacker approach here is to get the user to select all. That experience is pretty terrible for so many users. And it messes up your email deliverability too because so many of those messages are marked as spam. YesGraph removes that problem while keeping performance solid.

AB Testing Without Trying

But we aren’t even close to done with our web tools. The best part is that by integrating with Superwidget, you’ll benefit from further tests and optimizations without needing to hire a growth team.

Focus on your core app without worrying about what an optimal invite flow looks like. We already know what it looks like, you just need to add the Superwidget and leave the rest to us. This is like how Amazon Web Services helps you build your app without needing to install racks of servers.

Dashboard Configuration

We tried really hard to make all the configuration options available in your YesGraph dashboard. You can literally set one line of code, and then configure the rest on the dashboard. This includes managing your contact importing, setting up email sending, configuring your email template, and adding social sharing options.

This means that an engineer can spend very little time on the integration, and someone who isn’t technical can go work on the rest. It dramatically lowers the cost of integration.

Go Try It Out ??

We’ve made it really easy to try it for yourself, for free, without creating an account.

Just head over to our live demo page to get started: https://www.yesgraph.com/demo/