Stripy Lobster

I've added some new features but mainly spent the last month trying to get people to try the site. This has been so much harder than I had anticipated. I ran a competition last month where you were entered into a prize draw just for recording a catch. It's about as simple as it can get, but I had hardly anyone sign up.

I thought people might prefer a 'proper' competition based on skill over a random draw, so this month whoever catches and records the most different species will win the prize. You need to enter the competition on the site which then generates an entry ID, and this ID needs to be in the photo to make sure the picture was taken during the competition window. So far nobody has entered - which means that if anybody catches any fish it's looking very likely they will get £50. I've spent time walking along the seafront speaking with fishermen trying to promote the site and I even took a stack of competition entry numbers with me to save people the hassle of printing out their own.

I think the problem is trust. I spoke with people who had various concerns. Some thought I was some faceless corporation, probably from oversees with dubious intentions. Others suspect this is some government ploy to gather data on people, and others who are sceptical their details will be sold to commercial anglers who will then come to their favourite spots with nets and trawlers. These are concerns I hadn't even considered and I'm not sure sure 100% how to address them. I'm going to add an 'About me' or 'Our story' section to the site with some background on who I am and what my intentions are. But I think it's going to be hard to convince people I'm just an ordinary person who had an idea to improve peoples fishing chances using their own data. Because they need to trust me that I'm not passing their data on to the government, or Captain Birdseye or any other third party. And right now I have no reputation or anything else I can offer to gain their trust.

I struggled to get people to use the site last time around. And I couldn't get any feedback either. I felt like I was just shouting into the void and things eventually stalled.

I'm now putting more work in having pivoted the idea from an analytics platform (I guess anglers don't care too much about the data) into a social platform where people can share photos of their catches and you can see your friends sessions.

I'm also adding more of a competition focus. This month's is a simple one designed to get people to upload photos and try out the new features.

I'm a web developer and have built a lot of products professionally. The marketing side is completely new to me, and much harder than I anticipated.

The aim is to get people signed up to the website and recording sessions. I am running a competition where anyone who records a session before the end of June is entered into a prize draw where they can win fishing lures. I picked a reasonable popular one thinking they would be more desirable, but still not that expensive keeping the costs low. I added a paid Facebook post letting people know about the competition and added a banner on the website landing page. I set the Facebook ad budget low with the intention of trying a few different ones over the next month to see what works and what doesn't.

First weekend was definitely not a success. Nobody recorded a session (I hadn't considered what to do if nobody wins the prize!). I have had a few likes and shares on the post but it has generally driven very few people to the website. Interestingly, it seems like people like a Facebook post without even visiting the link in it.

So, I have 30 days left to figure out how to run a successful competition.

Today I launched Stripy Lobster. The MVP has been online for a few weeks while I gathered feedback from family and thoroughly tested it. This weekend I made some changes to the homepage to make it clearer what the website offers. And today I updated the Twitter account and Facebook page with first posts, and updated the profiles.

I also posted to a couple of relevant Facebook groups to try and get more focused feedback from people who fish.

V1 is live!