The Tim Ferris way of Testing ideas and how I did it.
I work in the electronic Document Management and Records Management industry and wanted to build a hosted Web Based Document Management System that doesn’t suck. It has to be straight forward and easy to use.
Last year I read The 4 hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss and he talks about testing a product, before it even exists to decide if it will be viable. Rob from the Micropreneur Academy also discusses this.
Basically this is what Tim Ferris recommends:
Build a two page website. The main page describes what the product or service will accomplish. It has a strong call to action to buy the product. The second page is a signup page for the product clearly stating the price. The signup page also contains a web form that takes all the users information.
The next step is to buy $100 worth of Google adwords, limit the daily rate to $20 as well as the price you are prepared to pay for a click
This is one of the five adverts I ran:
Document Management
Wasily Store \ Retrieve Documents
$20 per month
docley.com
I ran these adverts for two weeks and here are my findings:
87 visits
142 page views
24 people went to the signup page. (27 %)
12 people signed up. (14%) I actually have their email addresses. I believe that these users will actually buy the product.
Before I started my test, I decided that if I can get a 10% conversion rate, I would feel confident in building a product that would be able to do what the signup page promised.
I went ahead and developed the product and it’s very close to launching. If you would like to get invited to the private beta, please go to the Signup page.
Stay tuned (Subscribe to the RSS feed or Twitter) for some sneak previews in the next couple of weeks.