And what I’ve learned about the mobile internet
In May 2014 I will move to Amsterdam (more about this in a future post), and just like every human being that needs to get rid of an entire apartment, it was time to do the typical post “family sells everything”.
And, since I took some vacation weeks — therefore I had a lot of free time — I decided to build a project using some new stuff like Node.js and MongoDB, and see what happened.
The Website
I based the website on a CSS framework I’ve built when working for Scup, responsive by default, because I didn’t want to spend too much time searching for a perfect e-commerce, besides believing that something simple is better.
I defined the prices, asked my friend Davi Pasqualetti for help to have quality photos, finished the website, tested it, published it and posted on my Facebook profile, at 9pm on a Friday. And went out.
Boom
A couple of minutes later, my phone would not stop showing e-mail arriving — because I made the website send me an e-mail indicating people interested at something, who knows if the database explodes, right.
All this combination, together with the respect to the website’s simplicity and responsiveness, guaranteed a success much bigger than I anticipated. There were 619 visits just on the first 3 hours, and 1690 in the next day.
Now, what makes me believe that the biggest part of the success is consequence of the respect to simplicity and responsiveness? Take a look at the chart below:
Most part of the visitors used their iPhone or Android, coming from the Facebook post. Since the website respected their device and was very simple, everybody finished the entire checkout process on their own mobile phone, guaranteeing huge numbers of interested people and reserving everything in a matter of hours.
So what?
So what that the answer is very simple: know your audience and respect them. My audience was word of mouth: social media, mainly Facebook, where most of my posts are shared. And since more than one billion people use them via mobile, it is natural that a simple and responsive website would have happy users.
I warmly thank the more than 300 shares the website had, from close friends to people I’ve never seen in my life.
Now let’s empty the apartment and fly to Amsterdam.
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