Unlocking 40k visitors/month with the "chanceme" distribution hack
How CollegeAI rose to the top of search results with a multi-part growth strategy in 2017
Startups in virtually any category have to figure out how to “hack distribution”- meaning find a way to get users quickly and sustainably. I have hacked distribution at each of my startups in different ways but CollegeAI’s distribution hack might be my favorite. It was by creating a service called “chanceme” that would guess your chances of getting into a college. I’ve told this story so many times I decided to write it down so I can just link people to it in the future.
“Hacking distribution” is different than a “growth hack”. When you “hack distribution” you’ve essentially found a “growth hack” that now has a barrier to entry (nobody else can do it) that can sustainably funnel users to your product. Many startups only need to hack distribution once, but may need to execute many growth hacks to achieve a single distribution hack. This was absolutely the case with CollegeAI
Before I take you on this adventure I should say that CollegeAI is in a maintenance state and has been for years. I doubt any of this works anymore, but at the time this one distribution hack worked to get us 100,000+ students yearly. I should also say that all the screenshots here were created/edited to reflect approximately what I was seeing at the time, but since this strategy was executed in 2017 not 2024 a lot of things have changed- Quora was huge, SEO generated content was just taking off etc.
The search for a growth hack
I discovered the “chanceme” strategy on the 44th page of the google search console for “CollegeAI”. We had barely any website traffic so it was basically one person who somehow got a result containing CollegeAI for the term “chance me harvard”. It was super deep in the search results- so deep most of the search terms didn’t make sense.
I googled “chance me harvard” to see what this person might have been searching for, and found a nascent subreddit where people were discussing their chances to get into College.
Reading through this subreddit, I found a trend where people would give a bunch of their high school stats and ask what their chances were. Most of the answers were subjective like “You’ve got pretty good odds” or “Definitely look into safety schools” but there was something unsatisfying about an answer like that for someone who loves data and analysis. I wanted to do better.
My first idea was to create a bot account called “collegechancebot” that would output a fairly objective probability based on the bell curve distributions of scores and class position, this was data we already had. We built a simple function that took a bunch of scores, high school GPA etc. into a calculator and spit out an approximate probability. I would then manually respond on most the posts:
This got a bit of traffic but because the subreddit was super nascent, this was totally unsustainable. There had to be a better way. I wanted to own the search traffic for anyone searching “chance me XXX”, but for that we needed backlinks.
Quora
Quora was huge in 2017, especially for this “chance me” phenomenon. We wanted to somehow link back to CollegeAI, but we wouldn’t have been allowed to spam our website on every answer (in fact our marketing intern tried this and was banned from Quora). Still we wanted a way to be able to use Quora as a channel and answer the hundreds of questions that looked like this:
I liked to use data in my responses, and realized if I gave an extremely thorough answer, I could link back to CollegeAI by citing my data or background. This was good, but the great answers took a long time to write and moderators would still interpret it as spam. Moreover, it didn’t actually get anybody to click into it.
We were building a lot of tools around our core value proposition of guessing where students would go to college, and while we were building those algorithms and cleaning our data, we often looked at different admission graphs for schools. At the time many colleges didn’t release their SAT score acceptance distribution, so we were looking into ways of approximately deriving that data from other factors.
Eventually we had some graphs that we thought would be interesting to students so we made collegeai.com/chanceme, which was a website that took in various scores and output helpful graphs for understanding where you fit in the distribution of applying students.
We then realized that we write very short answers, then cite these graphs with a link. Suddenly we could write very short answers that were both helpful and gave us a backlink.
The answers would vary wildly in popularity and we would answer other questions (answering Quora/Stack Overflow is good practice for understanding your audience) but it was a great growth hack to get our chanceme page off the ground.
Distribution Achieved
After that CollegeAI blew up on google and we had hundreds of sign ups to our main service daily. I don’t have many records from 2017/2018 because it was my first startup and I was pretty sloppy- but the data below from 2023 shows that the distribution hack was incredibly enduring- 6 years later we’re still getting 100k visitors from our work.
Distribution is half the battle
Ultimately CollegeAI failed because we didn’t figure out a good way to monetize this audience, and lacked a lot of focus committing to a single product. My takeaway is that distribution is a very difficult problem and half the puzzle for a startup, but the other half- building a great product and getting product-market or… product-monetization fit- is just a critical.
Hopefully it’s also pretty clear that we weren’t spamming all over the internet and hoping something would go viral. We had a methodology that centered on helping students where they were and tried to create a ton of value for all of our growth hacks. Finding areas where people are underserved is a great way to hack and own a niche.