The past two days have been a lot of fun. We launched Alacra Pulse Wednesday morning and it's been a busy couple of days. Yesterday was a whirlwind for me. I woke up with adrenaline racing, which quickly turned to "what if..." anxiety during the commute then back to an adrenaline rush the rest of the day.
This was a pretty exciting launch for Alacra. Most of our products focus on niche markets and the products generally sit behind a subscriber login wall.
Alacra Pulse was different for us. It’s probably the first product we’ve built that has strong potential appeal for the mainstream user. Plus, it’s the first freemium app that we’ve built, so it’s out there for the world to see. And (we hoped) those factors would also give it appeal to media and blogs.
The launch went largely as we’d hoped. The product performed as expected and the media response exceeded expectations.
We did more preparation on the PR side than we’d done in the past. Following a recommendation from David Meerman Scott, we built a media room for Alacra Pulse. It’s nothing flashy, but it gave us a structure to package the press release, product details, screen shots, FAQs and other background information in a single place. That made it easier for bloggers and journalists to write the story.
The day started well, when the launch was picked up by the respected blog A VC (authored by Alacra board member Fred Wilson) and by FreePint’s VIP LiveWire service. Those were followed by an article by Michelle Manafy at eContent (btw - if you haven't seen it, you should read this FierceContentManagement interview with Michelle).
The Alacra Pulse launch got picked up by several other news sites and blogs throughout the day, including this thoughtful post by Steve Sieck at SKS Advisors, and later peaking with a piece on TechCrunch that afternoon.
Throughout the day we also monitored tweets. There were more than a hundred Pulse-related tweets during that first day.
Of course, the launch is just the beginning. In the days and weeks to come, we'll be working hard to build on that initial splash to grow the Pulse user base. If you've been using Pulse and have some feedback, please drop me a note or post a comment below. If you haven't tried it yet, visit the site and then share your thoughts.
BTW - You can follow @AlacraPulse on Twitter.
