I was excited about an idea... now it's dead.

Hey folks,
since we read a lot about validation lately I want to share some thoughts on the recent "invalidation" process of my current favorite idea...

TLDR:
*I was excited about an idea... moved forward... tested it... and finally invalidated it. Now I am free to move on without any doubts of "could have worked". *

It feels good - you should try it! ;-)

So a few weeks ago I stumbled upon @ZackBurt s CodeForCash reportings about his progress in the forum here. (developers getting slack messages with relevant filtered project / job offers and paying a monthly fee) It was great to read about a "working" concept and my first thought was "Hey, as this works well for developers - it might also work for freelance designers who are looking for projects too..."

I reached out to Zack to get a feeling if he was open to some kind of cooperation in case this is also relevant for designers and learned that he (of course) already thought about other verticals which can use the same technology for scraping projects of the main online platforms. So this was kind of a first check to go forward - I was not eager to build and maintain just another complex system for a side project.

Next, I directly reached out to ~90 designers which I found using the public profile pages of Dribble, Behance and XING (which is the german version of LinkedIn). I posted an image asking for the #1 challenge into two facebook groups with ~20.000 designers each. I also posted into to a few designer forums and newsgroups. My main goal was to talk to as many designers as possible and find out what their #1 challenge is when looking for new design work.

Results:

• The forum posts completely failed. Either I got no responses or a discussion about low-rate $5 fiverr designers who "ruin the rates" broke loose. No way to discuss any relevant "pain point" there...

• One of the facebook groups picked up my posting and I got some likes and ~8 comments from designers who stated their challenges.

• My 90 cold outreach mails with the subject "Your advice?" got a whopping 84% open rate. But back to the harsh reality, I only got 8 answers in total after following up with another mail after 5 days. (Sidenote: I split tested two emails, one contained the explanation "why do I ask this?" and the other did not. The email containing the "why" resulted in a 17% reply rate while the other only had a 5% reply rate.) Lesson learned: 1) split test the mail copy 2) follow up at least once after a week, better twice if you get no answer.

After all the conversations I compiled a list of "pains" and the main takeaways I noted down.

While waiting for the designers to reply I set up a single landing page as a smoke-and-mirrors test. I did not have a product to sell nor did any of the tech work. I simply wanted to see if anybody would purchase the offer just from seeing the landingpage.

I used a similar copy like the one on codeforcash and added a spin for my designer colleagues. My guess was the designers I target are mostly looking for remote projects.

I only set up the "landingpage", a single PayPal button on the "payment page", a "success page" and a "more questions" page. Nothing fancy, just using my existing wordpress installation as a base. (You can check it out here: http://uxstepbystep.com/product/design-project-stream/)

Screen Recording:
I also set up Inspectlet. A tool where you can record up to 100 user sessions per month for free. Essentially like a screen recording tool which gives you insight into what the users are doing, reading and clicking on your page. I wanted to know how far they scrolled on the landingpage, and at what text or images they exited or clicked.

Facebook Ads:
Also just while I was talking to the designers I ran a small facebook ad campaign to drive traffic directly to the landingpage. I spent 20€ to drive ~229 clicks / visits to the page. Resulting just below 0,10 € per click. Nice, but during the campaign I noticed my (1st-time-amateur) setup of the target audience was worldwide. So I had a lot of clicks from asia which might be the reason for the low CPC.

Conversions:
About 19,8% of the visitors on the landingpage clicked trough to the "payment page" which I think is not too bad. But on the payment page however no sales were generated.

Back to the "always talk to your customers" part: Are you curious what other designers mentioned as their #1 challenge?

For most freelance designers (who I talked to) it is absolutely no problem finding new leads and clients. Most get project offers from former clients who have been happy with their work in the past or from new people who have been referred by a former client... Lesson learned, word of mouth is king and everyone should be pro-actively facilitating that. Asking for referrals, staying in contact with "passive" clients, having a system for it...

Oh yeah, and most freelance designers avoid bidding for projects on online platforms like fiverr, 99design and upwork since they consider it bottom-feeding and they dont like to compete on $5 projects with overseas hourly rates. However some have success using those platforms as lead-gen tool - if they take the time to filter for the "good projects" only...

Still, what are the challenges? From my notes other designers find it challenging to:

• find the RIGHT KIND of projects
• filtering the offers for what projects will be a good match (skills & expectations) in the end.
• find the RIGHT KIND of clients (=people) who they are willing to work with in a good and healthy relationship (-> saving time without stressing about bad projects, working on stuff they are good at, beeing able to perform well and facilitating more word-of-mouth in the future...)
• juggle the TIMELINES of multiple projects and deadlines
• Getting the people on the other side to do the necessary work on time, deliver input, commit and work within deadlines too so they dont have to delay a new project or even work a nightshift because suddenly they all need the results tomorrow...
• switch between beeing a designer, doing the work and beeing a salesman and and a business on the other hand where they need to work "on the business" and "on themselves" to improve personally over time

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I hope you got some value or interesting insights out of my "validation notes". I certainly did. My original goal was to learn what works for others and to validate if my idea has any value. I learned what works for most designers: "word of mouth and referrals" and I also learned that my idea is probably not worth pursuing any further. At least in the current form of "delivering matching project offers instantly to designers via chat message and charging a monthly fee". My smoke-and-mirrors test landingpage http://uxstepbystep.com/product/design-project-stream/ did not "convert" to a purchase at all - however some at least clicked trough to the buy-button ;-)

One could argue I did not talk to enough designers, or I talked to the wrong ones, did not drive enough traffic, etc. That might be true. Who knows ;)

In the end I had some fun working on the idea, connected to fellow designers, learned some stuff (fb ads, cold email outreach, daily struggles of freelance designers, etc.) but I will currently not move forward with the idea.

Who knows, If I let it sink in for a while some new angle or insight will occur and I will give it a shot again. But right now. I'll move on to other ideas and maybe find another actual problem which is worth solving as a side-project.

Kind Regards
Patric

PS: Feel free to share your thoughts on the process and the result! Did I quit too early? What else could I have tried? I'm curious to hear your thoughts! ;-)