10words.io

10words is a startup focused directory listing that focuses on it’s email newsletter and a long lived web crawlable archive of listed startups.

The catch: you need to detail your startup in 10 words or less.

What’s included? ¶

A listing on the homepage and on the archives page covering about a half a dozen other startups. The free service allows for the same listing process but with a waitlist of literal years, or the $20 paid service which skips the queue and gets you listed and sent out in a week or so.

Aside from the listing on the site with the included backlink you get included on the email newsletter sent out to 2k+ subscribers. You can also be listed on the Friday round up letter giving you another round of views.

The catch is that you need to describe your startup painpoint in 10 words or less.

Included:

• Temporary home page listing
• Archived listing that remains crawled / crawlable
• Full backlink
• Domain and your 10 words as a link. No other content
• 1-2 email send outs

What do you need to supply? ¶

Results ¶

10words was a prefessional setup from start to finish. Easy payment, fast and clear communication. After the two email newsletters you get a summary of your impressions and clicks based on their tracking.

The joy of Truly Analytics is that we track our own analytics and have controls for bots and realtime analytics exporting. This means that as clicks came through we can both track them, determine what’s a bot and get the full attribution event stashed into our own data store. That means that as our First Party Attribution triggers we can immediately capture the full scope of 10words’ reach.

Overall, Truly Analytics ended up on both emails available from 10words with clicks scoring as below:

The email breakdown was:

So most users clicked through the later email on Friday rather than Monday newsletter.

Why the difference? ¶

We don’t know how 10words tracking works however knowing internal network security and speculating due to most of the traffic coming through email campaigns, we’d assume that email filters and protections could be triggering the additional views and clicks. There are some other possibilities but this would be the most likely.

Network Intelligence ¶

Truly Analytics has Network Intelligence built in so we can analyse the bots, data centers. AI Labs and private organisation networks connecting to our site. Whilst we had a small sample of connections with only the <20 visits we still captured data from both Verizon Business customers and Microsoft directly.

This means the following:

• 10words have active subscribers who utilised their Verizon business network to check out Truly Analytics
• A business with access to the Microsoft Limited IP range - most likely Microsoft themselves - visited
• A lot of Microsoft Azure Cloud services hit up the site, potentially email scanning across different regions

Email vs Listing ¶

Email drove all the traffic. Whilst the listing is active it’s not being utilised. We tested it directly and removed our activity from the analytics results so we know it works, but the reality is that users are more active and curious as to listings emailed to them than from a website somewhere.

10words also offers new-tab / homepage functionality where your startup’s tagline is in a splash every time someone opens a new tab. Not sure on the value in it or how well distributed it is but we hadn’t seen traffic. It’s a fun feature though.

Overall no matter how novel your systems and offers, email matters. Email done well as per 10word’s approach is the way to do it.

Paid vs Free ¶

This is a common topic in this area but the bottom line is that you’re paying in cost. You’re either paying for time and an in depth launch listing as per Product Hunt, or you’re paying pure cost to get somewhere in the listing. Realistically the free listing on 10words would never materialise as the waitlist was 2k+ startups. At 10 per week that’s over four years before being included, minus the paid placements to jump the queue.

Final verdict ¶

Good, Great even. The free listing is not viable due to the waitlist, but the paid listing got some real traffic.

Dollar for dollar 10words trumps pay per click by a long shot, however, your target market likely needs to be in that SaaS / founder space for maximum ROI. However, having the backlink available and the site live and crawlable pushes this over into an easy purchase.

One sticking point is that at the time of analysis the backlink had not been indexed by either Google or Brave. Our automated systems will continue monitoring yet we’d expect the site and backlink to eventually arrive and provide the value advertised. The site itself is actively indexed in both engines.

Truly Analytics ¶

We don’t doubt the impressions that 10words claim although we trust the clicks that were recorded in Truly Analytics. Having that first party attribution is absolutely key to our product telling us what and where our traffic has come from. In this case despite not lining up with 10words’ analytics we’re still happy with the result and can confidently stand by our purchase.

If you’re wondering who is on your site and what your true traffic looks like then trial Truly Analytics today.We built Truly Analytics exactly for this sort of analysis so we can find out:

• Who is on our site
• What our real traffic is and where it’s from
• Where the real value of our marketing and sales is