Kyron Horman: How a Missing Child Helped Build No Limit

Kyron Horman has the worst luck when it comes to in-laws as anyone watching CNN found out in June of 2010 when he disappeared after last being seen with his dad's wife Terri Horman. Her behavior caught the attention of the media sparking international outrage resulting in a witch hunt and a No Limit List prototype.

When Kyron first went missing the local news media was all over it, but it wasn't until Terri's behavior made things juicy enough to catch the eyes of Nancy Grace and other national news figures as more than just another missing child case. Her scandalous behavior included an alleged attempt to hire a hit man to kill her husband, sexting one of her husband's friends after Kyron disappeared, hiring an expensive defense attorney, and refusing to talk to police. The media loved it and she became the Tot Mom of 2010.

It was that climate that led us to register TerriMoultonHorman.com and use it to launch an uncensored forum about the case. Our main content writer for the immigration prototype drunk dialed me on the 4th of July and I easily talked me into it because I realized the potential of another prototype. At the time we had already decided to build No Limit List in stages and the Horman case gave me a chance to convert more code quickly, recruit users, and conduct search engine optimization (SEO) research while serving a good cause.

Early No Limit List prototypes achieved the basic functionality needed to provide a service for listing absolutely anything, but used an obsolete programming language and needed more features to be capable of retaining users. At that point most of our prototypes were coded using VB.Net and although we had built one using C# it had too many flaws, so we used Terri Moulton Horman to build the foundation for a better model. In addition to being able to convert more code our goal was to launch the site within one week from start to finish and develop a template that we could use to build a publishing service targeting any hot button issue just as quickly in the future. We succeeded with both and officially launched the site on July 9th, 2010.

After a press release marketing effort we were able to reach our target market easily on Twitter and by posting our URL on comment boards beneath relevant articles on news sites. We did have success with Facebook at first as well, but were kicked off for violating their stupid rules one of which bans the creation pages that were hurtful to an individual. We also had someone create a bogus Terri Horman profile on our behalf that did quite well until that account got suspended.

As a professional SEO I found the site quite useful for gauging search engine result pages (SERPs) performance with a relevant domain name for a breakout term with stiff competition. At first it got a lot of traffic from being on the first or second page of Google for "Terri Moulton Horman" before slipping to page 4 behind news authorities after the Dateline episode. Eventually I noticed it at number one 3 or 4 months after launch when the dust settled. I attribute that success primarily to domain name relevancy.

Conclusion

In the end Kyron Horman helped build No Limit List by being a good kid who did nothing wrong. We would rather give him credit for laying the ground work for us to build a practice field than the evil step mother last known to have seen him. In the end he helped us learn a lot and we put those lessons to work in ways that already create a better user experience for people on No Limit List. We hope that he is alive wherever he is and capable of reading our thanks someday.

Personally, I learned lessons thanks to Kyron that have helped me professionally. After accepting a full time job offer doing SEO work shortly after building TerriMoultonHorman.com I was able to use data acquired from it in the workplace to serve my boss better.

To show our thanks we will continue to keep the site online and use offensive marketing to drive traffic its way until he is found because we care about the small people.