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.
There is quite a bit of dicussion going on about this at Hacker News http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=891467
October 19th, 2009 at 6:53 pmNice start! I agree with the first Hacker News comment on assuming a single-digit conversion % from the email capture, but this could turn into a great case study on testing pre-development. Please send Amy a link when you’re further along and the results are in!
Good luck,
Tim Ferriss
October 19th, 2009 at 7:48 pmSocial comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Hackernews by teej: I’ve been itching to try this for some time. I would appreciate any war stories HNers could share….
October 19th, 2009 at 8:03 pmYou’ve spelled “efficiently” incorrectly on the home page. Good luck with the project though!
October 19th, 2009 at 11:15 pmInteresting experiment, hope the product goes well when you launch.
Couldn’t help but notice the typo on the homepage though - ‘effiecient’ should be ‘efficient’.
Wonder what difference that would make to your sign-ups?
October 20th, 2009 at 6:55 amThere are several comments saying your conversions will drop when it comes to purchasing the actual product, and they are right. However, the beauty of your approach is that you can split-test your landing page very effectively already since you have a basis for testing.
I’d be interested in seeing what sort of results you get if you change a block of text, or if you change the color of something. The important thing it to always be testing and to always measure your improvements. One improvement of .5% might not feel like a lot, but over two months and 10-12 tested landing page changes later, you’ll see a big payoff.
October 20th, 2009 at 10:08 amThe video on the main Docley site does not work. I click play and nothing happens. I tried it in Chrome and Firefox. I hope this isnt indicative of your software
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:02 amAdwords is great but remember it’s just one viable channel and not always optimal for all products. Also this type of testing does not tell you why the other 73% bounced off your site. They clicked the ad so there was some interest. Did the message not engage them, why not?
I would supplement your adword testing with some face to face or online usability testing (like usertesting.com, fivesecondtest.com) to get some answers. You can ask for a very specific demographic to view your landing page and ask them if they get it. Then tweak the page, rinse and repeat.
All the best,
Ash
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:35 am@Gertrude: Thanks for the head’s up. I am working on the screencast and upload it as soon as it’s done.
@Ash: Great idea! I will definately look into it and maybe post my results too.
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:49 am