Bootstrapping In a Nutshell is a series of articles where you'll learn how to bootstrap a new online business from scratch through a real-world project.
In this new post you'll learn that learning how to drive quality traffic to your landing page is NOT what you need right now.
Yes, you read that right. So why did I use this title? Well, I made it up for you to click on it god damn it! Sorry guys! I tricked you. But you'll thank me by the end of this article, trust me.
For now, what you really need are customer insights.
How to get customer insights
Well, that's easy — by talking to them. The non-easy part is to find these customers.
We created a landing page and hooked up Google Analytics in previous articles. That's great. But now what? We need traffic.
There are several ways to drive traffic to a landing page. You can post it on websites like BetaList, post some links on forums, reddit, Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, Hacker News etc.
The thing is, you may not come into contact with people who could actually become customers. I love these communities but are they really interested in the kinds of products you're trying to sell? I'm not sure about that. You need to target more specifically your visitors.
That's why I prefer to use AdWords and paid advertising.
What? Paying for ads? NO WAY bro!
Well well well. You know what? I'll tell you a secret: I'm greedy.
I'm probably the greediest person on earth when it comes to using software services or whatever. Partly because I'm a developer and I always think I can build this in one week instead of paying for it (which is always wrong btw).
But here is the thing: your purpose is to be able to validate or invalidate your idea as fast as you can. Because time is money. The less time you spend on this, the less money you lose.
The worst thing that can happen to you is to work on an idea for several months (even years!) without showing it to anyone. This is the best way to build something nobody wants. And there are lots of people out there that are excelling at this unfortunately.
By using paid advertising you can immediately push your product right in front of potential customers and get feedback.
By paying now, you save a lot of time and money that you could have spent later. Try to see it this way: by paying now, you become profitable in the long run!
And I can prove it to you. I use this mindset trick to help me overcome my little-greedy-me:
Let's say you want to be paid $2,000/mo. There are on average 20 working days in a month, so one day of work is worth $2,000 ➗ 20 = $100. This means that each day you work on your project, you lose $100.
By paying let's say $60 of paid advertising, you can reach several hundreds potential customers in a glimpse (depending on your CPC). That's magical. Because it will help you test your idea very fast and save time and money by discarding a bad idea instead of spending useless weeks on it!
Let's start with $20
Here is my first iteration for my landing page hosted on upcomingmovies.io:
I run some AdWords campaign for this first version with the exact match "upcoming movies" query. Here are the results: 108 clicks, 14.42% CTR, $0.22 CPC, $23 cost for... 0 conversions (1 conversion = 1 email collected).
I checked Google Analytics and the average time spent on the site was 25 secs.
Plus, in AdWords, I saw this extremely important metric:
72% of users were on mobile. That is nuts. It's something you should take into account when building your website (especially your CSS stylesheet!).
Imagine if I optimized my webpage for computers for several weeks (because, you know, I work on my computer so my users should too). I would have lost so much time! That's why it's critically important to ship stuff fast and to get these insights early on in your development phase.
Now I know that I must optimize my website for mobile, not for desktop. That's a serious insight.
So with $20, I learned that people searching for "upcoming movies" on Google didn't like my landing page or the service I proposed (newsletter) and are mobile users.
After thinking about it, it seemed obvious. When I type "upcoming movies" on Google I want to see upcoming movies, not to subscribe to some newsletter or whatever about movies you goddamn idiot!
You might be saying, "This guy is dumb. He could have thought about this before doing his landing page." Yes, I could have. But when you work on your project, you become blind to obvious things all the time. That's why showing your early work to the real world is critical.
Let's do something else
With these new results in mind I decided to put myself in the shoes of my users, again. When I type "upcoming movies" in Google, what would I expect? Well, to see a list of upcoming movies!
So I built a new version of the site quickly while learning front-end development at the same time, and here it is:
Not bad. What do you think? As I'm not a designer I'm pretty proud of this.
Anyway, one important thing here: the whole back end is NOT working. I developed a quick & dirty PHP script using tmdb to get movie data: posters, releases dates, plots, trailer links. But the Notify me button just asks for your email, and then it sends me an email with the email address and the movie you want to be notified about. The notification part is not developed at all.
While working on this, the developer in me wanted to spend a lot of time building this out. It's just the fun part for me. But I knew that this time would be wasted if nobody wanted that service.
The purpose of this new version is to collect emails so I can talk to potential customers and get insights from them. If I can collect an email and tell the guy the service is not running yet but we should do a 5 min Skype call to talk about it that is absolutely awesome. Because I'll get insights on what he really expects from the service before building it.
This way I make sure I'm building something that someone wants. Plus I'll get motivated to I know someone is waiting for my service!
Quick note here: push for phone calls over emails. You'll get more information and insights while talking instead of conducting email conversations (which are not time efficient at all).
Let me emphasize this again: you must put your website out as fast as you can to get insights early.
I spent two weeks trying to get this website off the ground because I'm pretty new to front-end development (jQuery, bootstrap), but I did the bare minimum needed to test my idea. If I could have made it in two days, I would have! Ship FAST.
Let's bring again some people on this new site
I spent $40 on ads for the new version of the site.
Here are the results: 107 clicks, 14.94% CTR, $0.37 CPC, $40 cost for... 0 conversions. Again. #FAIL. Google Analytics told me that this time, the average time spent on the site was 2m30s — that's better! But nobody used my service. Not a single email collected.
At this point I could be extremely disappointed and sad, and a part of me is. But another one is grateful. Indeed, instead of pouring my soul — time, money, and talent — into a project nobody wants, I can acknowledge that this idea doesn't interest anyone and move on.
Most of your projects will be failures, but that's ok, because you always learn something from them. If 90% of projects are failures, you just have to ship 91 projects to have one success. If you ship fast, you can do this in several months.
By spending $60 on paid advertising, I've just saved myself more time and money than ever by not working on this project. This is important to understand.
So here is the thing: I decided to put this website on auto-pilot. I run the PHP script with a cron job to get new movies every 12 hours, so the website auto-updates.
And with that, I won't spend any more time on it. Sure: if I collect some emails, I'll start a conversation with those customers, but based on the fact that my site doesn't rank on search engines yet, I don't expect to receive any traffic at all.
Anyway, I'm (almost) back to the beginning and brainstorming again to pick up a new idea for my next business! But I learned a lot during this process and I hope you did too!
In the next article I'll talk about everything I learned during this project. It will be the last article of this series!
ABOUT ME: I'm a 32 yo software engineer and entrepreneur. I use my free time to start new online businesses. Actually I'm learning front-end development while building an audience on twitter, follow me ;-).
NEXT ARTICLE: Ep #6: Advice for beginners and conclusion
FULL ARTICLES LIST
Ep #0: How to Select Your Next Business Idea
Ep #1: How to Select Your Domain Name for SEO
Ep #2: How to Validate Your Idea by Talking to Customers
Ep #3: How to Create Your Landing Page
Ep #4: How to Set Up Google Analytics For Your Landing Page
Thank you for the article! I know I'm nitpicking but I just have to point out that in "If 90% of projects are failures, you just have to ship 91 projects to have one success." your math is completely off. :D
Ha ha yes I know, it was more of a joke than a mathematical statement! It's just a mental trick to keep going no matter how many failures you had. I know you can do 1000 projects and still fail, even if the stats says 10% are successes, but it's demoralizing to think that way ;-).
👏
Loving this series. In some ways it provides better lessons than many of our success stories — especially about learning on the fly and pivoting quickly if things don't work.
Thanks for walking the tightrope for everyone's benefit!
Thanks Channing!
I'm glad you like my on-the-fly-lessons-learned :). I hope it will benefit readers and make them motivated no matter the outcome of their projects. Feel free to edit the article at your will.
I will publish the conclusion tomorrow!
My team uses remail.io. It automate email outreach and save its personalization features at the same time into inbound, outbound or communication with new or loyal customers.
Thank you for noting that 'a phone call trumps an email' every time.
I used to interview people via email until one day I did it via Skype and got all these LITTLE insights that I would've missed out on if I would've done it over email.
Or when someone says something "small", you dig into it a little deeper and find out that , that's freakin' interesting!
This looks like a cool little series.
You're intro - hilarious!
I know that feel bro!!!! Awesome series, the part where you talk and find the niche in forums I like it
Thanks man!
Hey Hercule! Thanks for being transparent about your own process! Have couple questions here:
Thanks a bunch :)
Hey shinshinwu, thanks for your comment. Here are my answers:
I wanted to use affiliate marketing through amazon to make $. I could have proposed the DVD/Blu-Ray of the movie people wanted to see and missed. I could have proposed deals also with partners. You can use advertisement if you have a huge traffic but you really need a huge traffic.
Yes you need to do some keyword research to narrow down your keywords. Using a broad keyword like "movies" is useless because you don't target correctly your audience. You need to optimize your traffic for conversion not just traffic! If you're selling movies tickets you don't want to rank for "movies" you want to rank for requests like "buying tickets for movies" or something more specific, you'll get less traffic but it will convert more on your website.
In a general way you must do keyword research before your website. The blog ahrefs talks about this in this article.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
Thanks.
No I didn't tried Facebook ads. But it wouldn't lead to more conversions. I drove 200 people on the second version of my website and got 0 conversions.
Doing more ads won't make my service something people need, I just have to try something else!
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
It depends so much on how your ad performs... I don't think it's comparable to use just price as a metric to select the platform you want to advertise on.
I think you should consider asking yourself: when do you want to reach your customers? When they do a research on google or by their interests (or location) through facebook.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
Hi Marc! The conclusion is here: Advice for beginners and conclusion.
Hey Marc! Thanks for your comment, I'm currently writing the conclusion, should get out soon 👍.
Maybe I'll do another series but it's quite time consuming. I think I'll try other ideas I have and talk about the one that may work or have traction.
Writing articles is awesome but don't get things done!
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
Well, to be accurate, "content marketing" would have been to blog about my product, not my journey to make this product. Because the traffic I may drive that read this series won't be interested in my product but in how I made it.
Anyway, sure I may have made a name here in the IH community, it may help me later to launch new products. But I think I have a lot more things to do to gather a big community behind me!
This comment was deleted 5 years ago.
Thanks Andrea for your feedback.
But I designed the service so there is no friction at all: it's completely free and you don't need to register. You just put your email (which is the only thing needed to receive the notification) and that's it.
I have set a 10% conversion rate threshold for my landing page test and I have 0 % conversion rate here... I don't think doing more ads through FB or using retargeting will help in any way.
This idea sucks, that's it! I'm comfortable with that :).
Hello content marketer...
This strategy sounds familiar ;c >
This comment was deleted 5 years ago.
I seeeee youuuuuu. LOL!
Love it man!