Celebrating 20 Million Posts – Social Champ Yearly Review!

Social Champ Yearly Review | It all started with a need, a birthday gift, followed by a bucket full of motivation. Every past failure is linked, the lessons learned are well revised and the dots all connected.

This Social Champ yearly review is to reflect and analyze. It is for my team at Social Champ <3. Their skills, dedication and pure belief, especially of my co-founders, have put Social Champ ahead of so many social media tools in such a short period. I’ve known these people since college times and am proud to work with them.

Social Champ Yearly Review

Let me highlight a few achievements we cherished the most in our journey till now and as we move further into social media space!

Our Traction:

• 20 million posts have been posted via Social Champ on social networks that include: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and Google+.
• 6,000+ social media profiles have been added in Social Champ.

Our Growth:

In the previous few months, we used to post an average of 400-600 posts daily on different social networks. In May, we posted around 500 posts daily, which seemed okay.

But June had been a very exciting and crazy month for us. We served around 1 Million+ posts daily. Yes, you read it right -1 Million Daily. Our servers had to be scaled, logics optimized and we had to stay alert before any instance gave up on exceptional errors.

How did this happen? Digital Agencies started using our system to serve their brands, and they managed a LOT of brands! Then they shared it with their other Agency friends, and then the explosion happened.

We spent a few sleepless nights keeping an eye on server logs and user actions on the, not very attractive, black screen. Imagine the grid of the matrix, but not in color green, but white.

At first, I thought aliens were spamming using our system, using profile names as ‘Asasa asad.’ But, when I marked them spam, they were humans who replied back, real humans who discovered the potential of the product empowering their social media automation, at least that is how it looked from their actions and my imagination combined.

But, I’m super happy that our servers didn’t show the ‘white flag’ and kept serving, it had few hiccups, but we were there to fix it. This is the scaling mode, and we absolutely love it!

Here’s how our overall graph looks like from the start. The orange line shows all posts served from Social Champ, the blue line shows the total number of social profiles added.

Customers that kept asking

We made a product that we wanted to use, optimized it for ourselves and then decided to share it with the world. In a few months, almost all released features were from the wish list of our customers!

We also created a secret Facebook group only for our paid customers, where they contribute to reporting bugs and keep asking for more features.

If you ever decide to buy a subscription of Social Champ, you’ll see how that group has transformed and how complaints/bugs are reported in a flash without any hesitation. This is our success that people are comfortable in reporting. Any new feature we release, that’s the place where we announce it first.

Imagine a post that had to be posted at 2:00 PM but gets posted on 2:01 PM, that’s a problem.

Our journey till now had been full of geeky adventure: managing servers, customer requests, prioritizing features, giving technical support and educating the new users. It had not been easy. Imagine a post that had to be posted at 2:00 PM but gets posted at 2:01 PM, that’s a problem.  OR a person sitting in the United States, having an employee in Australia managing their social media profile and demanding to have time zones managed.

Love and Support from Social Media Influencers:

Instead of just making connections we made great friends who used Social Champ. This may sound like a cliché, but when you get to read their suggestions and feature requests over and over again, you’ll figure it out.

Imagine yourself suggesting a new Pizza in town to your friends and hoping they love it too because your credibility is on the line.

Influencers like Guy Kawasaki, Peg Fitzpatrick, Ian Anderson Gray, Jehan Ara, Jawwad Farid, Alex Khan, Neal Schaffer, and many others not only gave input but also recommended us to their audience. Recommending to others is a great sign. Imagine yourself suggesting a new Pizza in town to your friends and hoping they love it too because your credibility is on the line. This is the same as ‘Sharing’ a post on Facebook as opposed to ‘Liking’ a post.

Here are a few screenshots of their explosive mentions:

Guy Kawasaki giving us a shout out,

Ian Anderson Gray mentioning us in his social media talk:

There are many social media influencers who supported us, but the best part is, support came from our home country too!

Jehan Ara, a die-hard fan of Apple got super excited when we released our iOS App and shared it all over. In fact ‘The Nest IO,’ a Tech Incubator she runs, recommends it to all their startups for social media marketing.

Jawwad Farid did a 30-day experiment using Social Champ and composed a brief report on the traffic he got from social media channels.

Note the terrific change on twitter which went to 3,250%.
Check out the following change in traffic he received on his blog, also note the terrific change on twitter which went to 3,250%! That happens when you use our ‘Repeat’ option that retweets the previous tweet automatically.

And we also got support in the form of testimonials,

Peg Fitzpatrick – Author, Speaker, Social Media Marketing Pro

Social Champ has unique features that I love. One favorite is the ability to add images from the blog post that appear on Twitter – Peg Fitzpatrick

Ian Anderson Gray  – Social Media Tool Guy, Speaker, Coach, Consultant 

Social champ isn’t just your usual scheduling tool. It has some fantastic features up it sleeves! It doesn’t just just satisfy your inner-geek but really boosts for your social media marketing without adding your own graphic. What a time saver and it helps my visual marketing shine online!- Ian Anderson Gray

Alex Khan – Speaker, Editor, Video Coach

Social Champ is an effective tool to automate your social media posts. What I like best is auto-retweet feature that allows me to repeat my own tweet multiple times throughout the day based on the schedule I set in advance – it’s a time saver! – Alex Khan

Neal Schaffer – Author, Marketing Influencer

“Social Champ is an innovative solution that helps you publish your content in an intelligent way to maximize exposure.” – Neal Schaffer

Social Champ Yearly Review: Social Champ Features

I’ll keep this section precise to give an idea of how much powerful Social Champ has become.

• Click Once – Share to Many – Share content in one click across multiple social networks
• Repeat – Posts can be repeated multiple times. Previous posts get auto; deleted, retweeted or hidden
• Repost –  Posts can be repeated weekly, monthly or yearly for a definite or indefinite amount of time
• Bulk Upload – Using a CSV file one can schedule, repeat or repost 1000+ posts in one click
• Auto Post RSS – Add your favorite blog or RSS feed and auto share on multiple social networks
• Content Suggestion – Find good quality and productive stories to share
• Image Editor – Use the power of Adobe to edit your images applying filters to stickers
• Draggable Calendar – Drag posts in calendar view and quickly schedule or edit
• Queue Custom Timings – Setup a custom queue and keep filling those timings
• Link Shortening & Tracking – Links get auto shortened and tracked using UTM codes
• Groups – Group your favorite or similar social networks and select them all in one go
• Analytics – Track clicks, likes, retweets, favorites and export them in CSV file too
• Chrome Extension & iOS App – Picks the content right from the website and schedule

Upcoming Features are,

• Team Management –  Users will be able to assign social profiles to team members
• Repost – Enhance repost feature and support evergreen content from a selection of posts
• Android App – Functionality will be similar to iOS App

And there is more to come. We are lucky to have our backlog full of feature requests from our customers.

Social Champ’s Product Review:

What is SocialChamp and How Do You Use It?
Mike Gingerich – Speaker, Author

Scheduling Your Social Media With Ease
Lyndsay Phillips – Content Marketing Expert

Social Champ – Scheduling Posts
Natalie Ann – Blogger – Actress

LinkedIn is NOT Facebook, STOP IT
MariAnne Vanella – CEO, Sales Development

10 Takeaways From #SMMW16
Sherry Hayes Peirce – Speaker, Trainer, Social Media Consultant

Hootsuite vs. Buffer vs. Social Champ – Which One Wins?
Paul Shuteyev – Growth Hacker – Digital Marketer

Support for New Platforms:

1) Launched a new Chrome Extension which allowed users to schedule from any website.

2) Launched an iOS App

Supporting More Social Networks:

We now support scheduling on: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ and Instagram.
In fact, we supported Instagram a few months back, and our users loved it!

Launching Affiliate Program:

In Social Champ yearly review, I would love to introduce our affiliate program.
We introduced our Affiliate Marketing program through which other digital marketers could also earn from Social Champ by sharing and referring us to their followers.
There are two options for marketers to choose from:

• 100% one-time commission on each subscription
• 20% recurring revenue share from the subscription

They can simply join in a few easy steps, advertise on their digital platforms and earn competitive returns from IdevAffiliate

Social Champ Yearly Review: Winning Startup Competitions

Social Champ stood out first among 180 participating startups from all across Pakistan, in Momentum winning prize money of $10,000. I was lucky to receive the cheque from Imran Khan himself!

Co-Partnering and other activities:

Social Champ has partnered with PromoRepublic and provides its social media content designers with the access to Social Champ’s scheduling platform.

Social Champ provides free limited access to all start-ups that get incubated at The Nest IO, having global partners such as Google for Entrepreneurs and Samsung.

Social Champ Yearly Review: International and Local Media Mentions

Behind every successful start-up, there are failures. This is one Pakistani entrepreneur’s story: Story

This social media scheduling app is getting rave reviews from Guy Kawasaki: Story

Pakistan-based Social Sharing App takes aim at Buffer and Hootsuite: Story

Social Champ – Where you Post Like Champion: Story

One thing that needs to be the part of Social Champ yearly review is, I also got lucky enough to be invited at Dawn News Channel for an interview to their show “Do Raaye.” Talked about Social Champ, Startup ecosystem and the role of incubators. I might want to join Showbiz next. Who knows!

Investment / Seed Funding raised:

Even though it’s Social Champ yearly review, it’s been an amazing year still, we haven’t raised a single dollar yet. After failing 3 times previously, we decided to bootstrap this product too. We learned a lot from the past.
We are now looking for seed options to grow and scale quickly.

However, we are currently looking for seed options to grow and scale quickly.
If you are seriously serious (note: the seriousness in serious) and interested in investing, please contact me at [email protected].
It will be super helpful if investors can send in the following details too:

• A brief introduction about yourself
• Companies you have invested in so far
• Your field of interest.

Confession:

We knew that one day we’ll have to prepare for scaling, but never expected it’d happen this fast. Some users noted our performance issues as we were optimizing and scaling our servers, serving 1 Million posts a day.

There had been times when we released features so fast that some bugs made their way to our users, but were lucky to have a community that kept reporting. We truly understand the frustration it causes and now does a better job in testing.

Some days our customer support replied after 24 hours, which is quite late in our startup culture. We will try to keep up with it in the coming days. Some queries require us to connect with users on Skype and demo them too, we will be solving this by recording tutorials.

Demand for our Android app is high, we know it. Even if there is something missing in Social Champ yearly review, you might find it in next one!

We are working on a solution that will change our current iOS and Android app altogether and bring more features too. Give us a few more weeks, and it should be up soon.

This is all from my side to my team, friends, mentors, and followers. Thank you all for your support and prayers. Stay tuned for more updates and more Social Champ yearly review!