Free marketing @ WWDC 2012!

Aug 1st 2012 algolia

Let’s rewind time a bit. Back in June was the famous Apple Developer Conference, aka WWDC 2012. Algolia didn’t even have a website at that time, but what we did have is a friend who would attend: Thomas! That was an occasion we could not pass!

Thomas agreed to speak about us a bit and to invite people to visit our website. That simple action defined our deadline to have a website up and running. But wait! That would be better if people could also find the site when Googling our company name. That meant a few days to allow for indexing… and a tight deadline!

About two weeks of brainstorming and implementation went into the web site. Our goal was to have a clear presentation of our mobile search lib… and to be found on Google! And you know what? It’s damn difficult to do so in so short a time! Our site was up and running two days before the conf and we immediately submitted it to all search engines. Unfortunately we were not in first position when Googling for Algolia 🙁

Fortunately, things improved without delay. Two actions were particularly useful in helping our search rankings: our participation to the Evernote DevCup, and our blog opening! We quickly got the pole position for our brand and started to rank well for some key queries like mobile instant suggest 🙂

We also thought about creating some posters that explain our technology, but eventually we were so concentrated on the web site that we passed.

Result: Some awareness, one subscription to beta and more importantly, a running website! Next marketing related action would be to have a demo ready for LeWeb in London, but that’s another story…

And here is what you could see on WWDC whiteboards:

WWDC Message 1