Life, distilled by Will Critchlow

I have been hugely impressed by Launchrock. I initially thought it sounded like the perfect example of Feature Not A Company but I’ve been convinced that if what they have is a feature, it’s one that should be present in every email provider’s toolkit.

In particular, I’d like Mailchimp to buy them please.

Yesterday, we ran a “ship-a-thon” at Distilled (like a hackday, but designed to be more inclusive of everyone who isn’t a developer / designer - the idea being that we all spent the day shipping stuff to make the company better).

I worked with 4 colleagues to ship an internal alpha launch of a product we are calling “DistilledU” - a learning platform for internet marketing. The first thing we shipped (in good “lean startup” methodology style) was a pre-launch landing page. Obviously we could have built this pretty easily on our own, but I was very impressed by how easy Launchrock made it to create a great-looking page with all kinds of embedded social sharing etc. and a 43% conversion rate.

Yes. You read that right. So far we have had getting on for 1,000 sign-ups at a 43% conversion rate.

I was amazed by the tweets it generated and the great feedback loop that resulted in ever-more signups. When you combine that with the analytics in the back-end, really the only thing missing is integration with Mailchimp. So - to Mailchimp - I don’t care if it’s a feature, I’d like it integrated - even if you have to buy it.

(If you want to see more about our vision for DistilledU, you can read more about our efforts here and of course you can sign up to stay up to date here).