Willio
Online Estate Planning Tool (soon: Digital Wills)
We’ve been running over $1K a month in google ads. Saw some decent signups, but nothing too great. It cost us about $60 per signup. Totally scrapped it in favor of spending that money on micro-influencers on instagram.
We’ve run 3 campaigns with influencers so far and have had good traction so far. I can’t say it’s been worth it just yet, but I’m confident that if we find the right influencer with the right audience we’ll see a big ROI.
Yesterday I was testing different ways to store my Will on a blockchain. I chose to use Ethereum because I think we all can agree that it's going to be around for a while. I was using the Rinkeby Testnet to see my options for search-ability later on. The main reason I'm doing this is to see how we're going to build this into Willio. The ability to verify that it is truly MY Will is crucial to the security and pretty much the entire crux of why we're putting this type of data on a public blockchain. Eventually we'll have no more searching lock boxes and under beds for someone's Will when they pass away. Just search the blockchain and there you go!
Took about a month of programming but we finally launched gift cards that can be purchased and redeemed for a single account or husband/wife account. There’s a lot more under the hood when it comes to the gift card creation and redemption process (little did I know) and it took me about twice as long as I anticipated to build!
But they are finally available just in time for the shopping weekend ahead.
We bit the bullet and hired a PR professional to come up with a press release and related documents. I built a press room page on our site to house the necessary documents. Our PR pro launched to 688 different publications today (all within the state of South Carolina). We figured we would do a state-wide launch, then see how it goes before we do a national launch. Maybe a good idea? Might be a bad idea. Not sure yet.
Either way, the next few days should be telling as we hear from publications.
It's the classic story of adding more and more features and delaying our launch every time. We took a full year to develop the product (as a side hustle) but we finally launched during a time that probably couldn't have been better. My business partner is a lawyer and sees what is going on in the legal industry - COVID has certainly expedited the use of electronic signatures and moved more legal meetings online. We'd like to think we're helping push the industry forward by enabling more people to create a Will and eventually create a digital Will. Our goal right now to provide an easy to use tool to create a Will quickly and efficiently. We ask all the right questions to cover all your bases. We're not a one-size-fits-all, but we do fit many.
7 Comments
Hi Erick,
What was your influencer outreach like? manual or you used a tool?
I found a guy on Fiverr to get a list of influencers for me. He did an OK job. I think he just ran a scraper to pull anyone that had "DM me for collabs!" in their profile ;) Then we manually reached out to people. Both through email and DMs. It's a lot of manual labor at first!
Hi Erick, like your tool. From the first glance it seemed you provide services as an agency, not as a SaaS. Interested to learn more about your product cause I get SaaS startups from 0 to $3K MMR in 6 months or do sales for them. Let's connect on twitter.
Sure thing, I'm curious if you could help in our niche though.
Is it the software that completes everything at the backend or you have people doing estate plans?
The software does everything. My business partner is an estate planning attorney. He wrote all the legal parts and I programmed the logic to build the will. It's perfectly legal and as if a real attorney wrote it (because a real attorney did write it).
If your product is a SaaS and you understand who's your ideal buyer, I can scale it. It's better to onboard first 50 customers manually, as you get amazing insights about who is / who is not your customer.