When one-time Apple evangelist turned entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki launched AllTop a year ago, I remember reading some pretty bad press. Headlines like Guy Kawasaki Launches AllTop. Wow, it’s Bad. and AllTop – A gimmick site with marketing flair aren’t exactly what one hopes to launch to.
When I myself visited the site I had the impression that it wasn’t as bad as some of the tech press made out, but it didn’t appear to be anything to write home about. If asked I would have summed up the site as a so-so idea with a decent execution and a famous founder. So I expected AllTop would go the way Guy’s other venture Trumors went – that is to a small but relatively successful end in a quiet acquisition.
In the intervening months however, I’ve been impressed to see the site growing and improving rather consistently. To this day AllTop is still not a site I personally use, nonetheless there does seem to be an audience for it, and Guy and his team have been doing a really good job of persistently pushing the site in the right direction.
Some of the things that I think the AllTop team have done right:
- Improving and Evolving the UIThere have been two redesigns of the site by a respected agency – Electric Pulp – who have done a good job of improving the user interface both times.
- Getting Lots of PressSure not every startup has such a famous founder, but when you do, you may as well get all the mileage you can out of it. Whether it’s been bad, lukewarm or positive press, one thing we can all agree on is that AllTop has had more than its fair share of write-ups.
- Personal TouchesAfter one of Electric Pulp’s redesigns I mentioned the site on our design blog Creattica Daily, to highlight the difficult job they’d had laying out so much information. That day much to my surprise Guy Kawasaki himself appeared in the comments. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t affect my feelings about the site. And here I am again writing up about AllTop, proving that personal attention in PR does wonders.
- Using Twitter to Promote the SiteGuy was not only an early adopter of Twitter, but quickly became a power user on the service. He’s used his @guykawsaki account to great effect in promoting the AllTop service both by linkage and mentions and also simply by people mentioning, linking to and following the account (which incidentally has a giant background promoting the service).
- Experimenting with Features to Improve the ExperienceRecently AllTop added the My.AllTop feature which I think has really improved the site’s experience. Like the original site it’s not a mind-blowing invention, but it’s a solid feature executed well.
- Cleverly Exploiting the Inherent Strengths of the ProductOne of the strengths of AllTop is that the sites it promotes are blogs with a medium to large audience. By giving these bloggers badges and recognition, AllTop has successfully won lots of incoming links and mentions. Another example of how AllTop has played to its strengths was in creating a page of leading Twitterers. It costs nothing to do and in all the Twitter hype I’ve seen this page mentioned many a time.
Traffic Growth on AllTop
AllTop’s traffic isn’t enormous, and doesn’t look like it’s on a big hockey stick curve. It does however appear to be consistently trending north-east. Here’s a snapshot of AllTop’s traffic according to Compete.
Compete.com's Traffic Analysis for AllTop
I also grabbed a traffic snapshot of referral traffic from the site to Psdtuts+ over the months. It’s not a huge amount of traffic but it is steady. Shown here is traffic from web-design.alltop, in reality total AllTop traffic is about triple this as Psdtuts+ is listed on a few different categories.
Traffic from One AllTop Subdomain to Psdtuts+
Persistence Pays Off
When it comes down to it I’m actually very impressed with AllTop. What has really won me over is that AllTop has demonstrated that most of the time you don’t need a lightening bolt idea to have a site succeed. Given a decent idea and a persistent team working to constantly improve and evolve the site, you can get impressive results.
While writing this post I was interested to learn that the original AllTop site was built for just $10,000. I’m sure much more has been since spent, but that’s great for launching a first-run product as it’s not a huge investment and it gave them a solid base to build on.
So, my hat (if I wore one) is off to Guy. I look forward to seeing AllTop continue it’s steady if not meteoric rise!
Thanks for the kind words. Really appreciate it.
Guy
Good article. I too have been impressed by Alltop. I hadn’t heard much about them until a few months ago I came across them on TechCrunch and they said a bit about em and I got curious.
I’ve always been too lazy to make good use of RSS feeds so this site has been nice for a few things that I do. I maintain a gaming community in which I post news about video games and then write a few opinion blog posts here and there. Alltop is my primary source for the gaming news because it does pull from so many sources.
Unfortunately I wasn’t happy with their latest update, you used to be able to hide what sites you didn’t want to get news from, which was great because I didn’t want peoples opinion blogs or sites dedicated to only consoles…so I was able to take all that out and narrow it down to a specific few, I can’t do that anymore but the site still works for me.
Interesting post. I definitely agree that so long as an idea is solid, and well executed, it doesn’t need to be mind blowing. AllTop’s traffic speaks for itself, there is a demand for the website, despite the competitive niche.
AllTop Kind of reminds me of http://addictomatic.com/
AllTop is a much easier name to remember. Took me 10 minutes to remember that addictomatic site.
Nice post. Some very cool info about AllTop & Guy Kawasaki, that cat is pretty good at what he does…
the design could have been better looking.
I have become a much bigger fan of the site with the implementation of my.alltop.com. I really enjoy being able to choose my own listings and alltop is waaaay more mobile friendly than iGoogle.
Another bonus resulting from the success of AllTop is that sites listed with the service are getting more traffic. It’s easy to aggregate content. Far harder to actually send any significant amount of traffic to the original sites.
To me that’s a mark of success with this model because I’ve never gotten any significant traffic from any other site like AllTop, and I feel like I’ve tried them all!
I have been fan of alltop for some time (and my blog has been featured in the leadership page for a short while). I think much of the “bad press” it received in the early days was from people who knew how to use rss feeds and did not see much value added in the service. For people (like me) who are keen to read blogs but did not know where and how to find the relevant ones Alltop has been a revelation.
I am not sure the myalltop feature is value added however as I personally find that part of the beauty of the magazine rack concept is that you discover new magazines rather than stick to your usual ones.
Great post thanks for the insights
Great Post.Nice site, I love the Idea, tough I don’t like the design as for a non tech savvy, it may be extremely difficult to navigate it.It looks a bit like a site for geeks, but well done, very good execution. He’s an inspiring Guy.