I have finished the first week with excellent numbers.
I had seven sales, 1 for $499, three for $99 and three for $49. According to analytics, I have got 821 visits and 727 unique visitors to my website. Awesome.
Just a quick recap - I have launched a service called After Idea that is meant to help people validating their market/idea. I am using lead generation companies to find the exact audience and then contact them by text messages asking to fill out a simple survey. You can check it out here: https://afteridea.com
I have decided to do the soft launch to test the waters, improve offer, landing page and fix issues, and prepare to release the service to the world.
Let's get to business.
Sales Channels.
I had set up four sales channels during this week (week ending on Sunday):
-Marketing Communities
-Quora
-IndieHackers
Let me go into detail with each of them:
1) Marketing Communities
As I have mentioned in my previous thread, I find marketing communities to be very unstable sales channel. Why is that? Well, the marketing community follows hype - they like new, unique services. They follow trends set by "gurus" so one day you can be the main provider for large companies, and then the next you will make not even enough to pay your contractors. I know this because I had a marketing company that created services and packages to be resold by marketing agencies. I was using the hype method by creating new companies/projects every 1-2 months and maintaining ridiculous high margins by selling unique services. So yeah, I know first hand that unless you are in for a quick buck, you better off looking for other sales channels. Still, marketing communities accounted for three sales!
2) Reddit
I have got mixed results. First of my posts got flagged and "ghosted". It means only me and mods of the subreddit can see it. The whole post was a bit too promotional, so it is my fault. While I have tried to keep it informative, I wanted to test what is "ignorance level" of their mods - apparently low, so I need to work much harder next time. I have also submitted a test thread to "I made this" Subreddit and got some excellent feedback. Overall I have got four visits for 45 minutes of the time invested. Not so good, but feedback received made it worth it!
I will be back on popular Subreddits though once I will be ready to do a full launch.
Of course, no sales accounted from this channel.
3) Quora
I have created around ten answers on Quora. I have tested different approaches:
-neutral response semi-related to my niche with embed link in the bottom
-quite a pushy post about different options to validate the market, including using my service
-blatant promotional post
Now the answer from the first option got featured multiple times and got most of the views out of the 6,6K total.
All other posts got pretty much no love (I tried getting one relevant answer to rank higher in highly targeted question, by getting votes from my friends - no results though).
I have edited anchor on my most popular answer from non-invasive to a bit more promotional (Quora allows you to edit answers).
So far 46 unique visits. Not bad, not good. I have got one sale as well. I have spent around 8 hours to get all answers and research on how Quora works. I think the ROI was not so good, but I will continue creating content on it to test it further.
4) Indie Hackers
I have mentioned After Idea twice on Indie Hackers I think. Once in a post informing about the soft launch and once in comments. Now, I have got some good traffic, but it seems most of the people were just interested to see the landing page, check the offer and pretty much "spy" on me. I have done the same, so I understand that people like to see how money-earning services look like. I have got some good results:
-feedback (absolutely fantastic, pushed me to do some serious changes - more about it later on)
-questions (forced me to rethink my market and my landing page)
-sales (got three sales!)
-traffic (I have acquired over 500 visits that let me test the server, code and engagement)
The results are in. The three traffic sources that brought me leads are Marketing Communities, Indie Hackers and Quora. The testing sample is still quite small though; I have removed marketing communities this week to check all other verticals. The plan is to create another 5+ Quora answers and one quality piece on Indie Hackers. I will be preparing on to moving to more platforms.
The power of soft launching.
I have received fantastic feedback. The decision to first soft launch was correct.
What is a soft launch? Well, you release your creation to a very limited, controlled audience. You pick 1-5 communities or markets and publish in a limited manner to gather initial feedback, adjust the offer and improve conversion rates. Once all that is done, you can do full launch, so in my case go to ProductHunt, HackerNews and any other community I can find.
The feedback was so fantastic that it pushed me to go with significant changes:
1) Remove three enterprise packages. I have left three basic packages for now and a link for buyers to contact me about custom packages. More packages confused. We will see how this works.
2) Simplify the submission form - it was too long. I will simplify it. Further, it just takes time.
3) Widen the market. Change the company market from Idea Validation to Market Validation. Why so? Well, Idea Validation is Market Validation, but Market Validation do not need to be Idea Validation. By doing the same and naming it differently, I will remove a bit of confusion and target a bigger market. So instead of answering an email asking if my service works on existing products and startups, I can give the answer in the website header.
The issues
Majority of the conversations I had with potential customers is regarding the same subject - will I share the leads that are involved in market research. It is challenging to explain that I am doing this as a part of market research. I am bound by NDA and contract that I will not share, nor redirect users from the survey. If I do, I will lose my very generous discount that will make this service un-reachable to the majority of potential customers (we are talking here about increasing the cost of the service at least tenfold).
Also, I would like to increase the conversion rates. One sale per one hundred visitors to the website is not something to be proud of, but I keep in mind that a lot of my visitors are bookmarking the site as they do not need it currently.
Another issue that is bothersome is the fact that the service is not making any profit now. I need to burn through the revenue and my savings to generate the leads and test the conversion rates. Within last week I have optimized response rate by prospect asking them to fill out the survey by more than 20%. If I could reach 30-40% over the original number, then I will start seeing some income (or maybe ad budget?).
Happy customers make everyone happy.
The customer satisfaction is impressive. So far every customer contacted me to let me know they like the results! This is amazing especially since I have asked for feedback none of them yet! The feedback received helped me to determine parts, that are good and the ones that need reworking. I will continue working closely with the customers to gather more data and use that to optimize the landing page.
The goals
The first week was fabulous. I have spent around 40 hours working directly on this project (including coding and adjusting things), so it became a full-time job. I have quit my freelance work, but in order to not leave customers in the dark, I have agreed to hire and teach my replacements. This will take another 2-3 weeks, so until then I cannot dedicate myself fully.
My goal for this week is five sales and 40 hours spent working on it and promoting it. This is possible, but since I am excluding marketing communities, it can be challenging. We will see. I think once I will finish current week I will have enough data and feedback I will be able to move full speed to proper launch.
Ask any questions below in comments. I am happy to answer them all!
You can check the website here: After Idea
Hey Bart, this looks like a fantastic service. I could see it working well for "indie hackers" then eventually moving up-market to helping established companies do research.
One personal request / tip – I wish you'd provide a detailed explanation of your process. As someone who'd use or recommend this, I'd be a little bit skeptical over how well it works. If you could outline what you do in detail (along with a couple full examples) I think I'd be less skeptical.
Thank you, I think this approach is the best - focus on smaller makers communities before moving on to b2b niche.
About the scepticism - yeah, I am getting this a lot. I will create a "Process" page where I will outline step by step everything. I think this will help a lot! I was focused more on optimizing the landing page for now, but possibly this is a top priority. I will make sure to get this done once the current week is finished.
Thank you for feedback and kind words!
Hey Bart,
was going to respond by e-mail but thought I'd share it publicly :)
I'm very satisfied with the service, and with my particular results as well.
For those interested, I ordered the $49 package and got 42 responses.
My questions are mostly around the method, terminology, etc.;
It would be cool if you could use the 3 days between the customer’s order and the report delivery to send some automated e-mails to educate customers about above questions. (I understand it's an early stage of the product, so see this as a suggestion for future versions).
All the best,
Andreas
Thank you so much, Andreas. I appreciate the reply here!
Thank you for the questions. I will be updating websites content to answer those questions next week.
Here are the answers:
Thank you Andreas!
Really interesting congrats!
Thank you!
Looks great, liking the idea of this service (what's in a name ;-)).
I often wonder if any of my ideas are valid, as I tend to get caught up in my 'developer mindset' which might limit the sight of practical use of a product. It's a good thing to have many people in many niches say something about a product. Nice work! The website looks slick as well.
Thank you very much. I tried to dig really deep and determine an underlying problem and most fundamental part of building a startup/business/product, and it seems to be an idea. Thus the decision on working on ideas :)
Great post! Congratulations :)
Nice article! Are you paying for Quora ads?
Nope, I tried testing the waters with it, but it asked me to pay $3 per click (which is a way too much comparing to other methods). I have closed Quora ads after receiving 5 views and no clicks (I set the budget at $0.5 per click for a test). As of now, I have no budget to test $1-2 clicks, unfortunately. I think this would burn my savings rather quickly.
Thanks for kind words!
Congrats Bart, awesome post man ;)
Looking forward to following the journey!
Thanks Pedro, much appreciated!
Thanks for this great post!
Sounds like I could lear a lot from you.
I made 50$ so far, 1 month after soft-launching …
I want to hear more form you. I’ll definitely follow you along. Please keep sharing your learnings.
Which marketing communities did you promote your product to?
Since you invested 8 hours in learning about Quora, you probably know a little bit about the platform, so I have a question for you:
Do you look at questions’ stats before answering? How do you decide which question to answer?
Thanks in advance
Your service sounds great. How can one define their target audience? Just words? How is that matched to people? Edit: waiting for your process page
Also, you could add a favicon. Makes the site look more finished.
Thanks for your thorough answer!
Could I target a group as specific as: People who write answers on Quora for marketing purposes, with 50K+ answer views?
I’m building findbetterquestions.com, just in case you‘re interested in that. (Automatically generates Quora stats spreadsheets)
Sure, no problem.
This will be a way to target. We could target people that are interested/tagged with Quora, Writing and with high social score. This should give you some good results.
Makes sense
Let me know if I can help at some point
I’ll also keep your site bookmarked. I still feel like I have more feedback then time to implement it at the time
Sure thing. Just a note, you have a typo in first sentence in "WHAT HAPPENS IF I CHANGE PLANS?" part :)
Thanks!
fixed
Hey Bart, thanks for sharing! It's really helpful reading through your process, findings, and approaches. Very much appreciate your openness with it all.
Thank you. To be honest I have a secret - I am semi-addicted to reading journeys like that, so since I have launched a product myself, why not give back ;)
Thanks for the insights Bart! Very informative :)
Thanks Davis :) I will try to not keep anything from the public and post regularly. Even if it can help one person - it will serve its purpose!
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I will try first focus on organic outreach. I rather avoid paying for ads until the service is profitable and I can pay for ads with the extra money I will have. I will need to think about platforms to use. I want to use Reddit to promote content created by me for now. I have seen some folk from IH and PH had some success with it.
Thanks for suggestion, I will keep this in mind!