Steven's Blank 4 steps

Here is my way:

1. Describe a customer whom you're selling to.  Height, weight and the size of underwear, please. (Customer Discovery)
2. How many potential customers do you have?  How big is your market? (Customer Validation)
3. How are you going to sell to them?  Can you repeat it? (Customer Creation)
4. Do it. (Company Creation) 

Does it fit yours model?

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

MPMM Software Giveaway

I have got a copy (actually, a few) of MPMM Professional edition that I want to giveaway to PM community.  While it's not about so trendy agile way, but more classic waterfall-and-all-around approach, one can find it super helpful in many occasions.

See the software brochure and download a free trial of it.  If you like it, read on, I can save you $495 (or $595 - whatever is on the price tag) and give it for free.

Let me quote a few things from the site:

MPMM Professional includes an entire methodology for managing projects. It steps you through every phase, activity and task needed to complete a project from start to finish. And it comes with all of the templates and examples you need, to save time. 
 
This edition also helps you customize your own project management methodologies. You can import your existing methodologies, processes and templates to manage them all in one place. And you can customize the methodology already included in MPMM, to use for your projects today. 

Sounds interesting?  It can be yours.  Absolutely free.

So here is the deal:

1. Drop me a line to my Twitter @iwhite and tell me why do you want it.
2. Follow me on Twitter @iwhite and subscribe to my blog live.prokhorenko.us. (I can't really check this and not like I'm going to, so it's pretty much voluntarily, but at least you know I've asked for. :)
3. Spread the word. I have more than one copy available and I want to make sure I'm giving it to people who will enjoy using it.

That's it.  No strings attached.  I'll send you a registration code (you have to download software yourself) and you're good to go.

P.S. If you know me personally, it's even better.  Send me an email, and it's yours.

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost

"Mad Libs" format for registration forms

Jeremy built the form to work as you'd expect. You can tab between the "blanks" just the way you tab between standard Web form input fields. You can click on any "blank" to start entering text. The password "blank" masks any characters you enter just like a standard password input, and the whole form manages errors if you answer any questions incorrectly. In other words, it works like a standard Web form but it looks quite different. The presentation is inviting and fun, which is quite unlike a standard Web form.

via lukew.com

Narrative "Mad Libs" format for signup forms was used in the several A/B tests and *actually* increased conversion by 25-40%.

I find it very cool. What do you think?

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost

GWO fails?

via abtests.com

One the two similar pages, GWO reports one as a sure winner. Followed up by the Google support forum thread http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/websiteoptimizer/thread?fid=6d558f0fdbcc7e5400047d0f1cd1c68a&hl=en

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost

The Cost of Customer Acquisition

...you can’t afford to ignore the cost of customer acquisition. The earlier you work on this the better, as many of the best techniques require you to build your product differently.

It is also important to ask yourself the question: can my business realistically expect to acquire customers for considerably less than the amount that I can monetize them?

via forentrepreneurs.com

Very nice insight into Customer Acquisition process.

If you don't understand this, do not start your business, until you understand every single word out of here.

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost

Improving bounce rate with Google Website Optimizer

As many of you already know, Google Website Optimizer (GWO) is a nice add-on to Google Analytics (GA) to run A/B/.. and multivariate tests for your pages. And while A/B test is pretty simple thing to do, multivariate tests are more fun.

However, working with some sites, you can't always specify the conversion page very well, the goal of your tests. If it's not an ecommerce one, or lacks a typical login / sing-up pair, you're probably hitting an "information resource". But such sites still need some work to be done, to get a better feedback and user retention. I would say, testing them for bounce rate and improving it later would be the nice thing to do.

Unfortunately, it's not very straightforward with GWO. You're still supposed to specify a page that will serve as conversion trigger.

One solution is that the bounce rate can be calculated by looking backwards, by looking at the conversions to any page. It's easy to do if you've got only one or two outbound links on your page. However, in the real life, it's unlikely to happen. Pages have dozens of outbound links. Going for all of them and putting a conversion script is probably doable, but such a headache.

But likely this can be done with a very simple Javascript. Let try to test the sample landing page. First of all, let's put the control script at the top.

Define the testing blocks.

And put the tracking code right before the body.

The landing page is set up. Now, we can start with the conversion page. You can use the same one as conversion page in your GWO experiment. However, you don't need to add any tracking code to it (yet).

What we should do know, is to add a simple Javascript that will re-write all outbound links and will add an onclick action to them. In this action, Javascript will do the call to GWO and register a conversion. This simple JS should be put right before the closing body.

[code lang="html]

[/code]

That easy. You might get an error while validating the conversion script, but you can easily copy & paste the content of script into file, and do offline validation for it.

Basically, that's it. You can finish setting up this experiment and run it. Here's how you will see results.

Have fun!

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost