This guide is based on Mixergy’s interview with Gabriel Weinberg.
Four years after founding a startup, Gabriel Weinberg has raised $3 million from investors and runs a search engine that averages 10 million direct queries per month. It was all done using tactics to get fans to help build your business, so we invited him to teach you how to do it.
Gabriel is the founder of DuckDuckGo, a search engine that was named one of the top 50 sites of 2011 by TIME Magazine.
Here are the actionable highlights from the interview.
Gabriel set up a community forum and added a feedback button at the bottom of every search results page.
Gabriel uses Desk.com to respond to feedback, created a FAQ page, and hired five moderators to help run DuckDuckGo’s message board.
Gabriel set up a page for DuckDuckGo where users can change settings for search results, privacy, site appearance, and user interface.
Gabriel features logos sent in by users and did a Reddit promotion that encouraged people to talk about DuckDuckGo and use it as their search engine.
Gabriel set up a billboard highlighting the privacy issues of search engines, which got featured on Wired and USA Today and increased site traffic.
Gabriel integrated several application program interfaces (APIs) with DuckDuckGo, such as Wolfram|Alpha, to provide users with instant answers to their queries alongside traditional search results.
Gabriel’s goal for DuckDuckGo is to reach 100 million search queries per month, so he obtained funding and created 10 action plans to achieve these goals, which include going mobile and turning DuckDuckGo into a pluggable search engine.
Watch the full interview now
Written by Hazel Chua, based on production notes by Jeremy Weisz