Taking the very first step of the Customer Discovery and asking for help

I'm working on discovering the potential group of customers for the product that I'm thinking of. This is going to be some sort of a communication platform (starting from email and going from there), that is easily accessible and configurable by non-technical people; that will also provide an extended set of tools to optimize and monitor your messaging. (I know: It sounds awkward, but this is just what I'm starting from. :)

The survey link is: http://bit.ly/bDe4n7

If you are starting or working for a consumer-oriented company and use email as a primary communication channel between you and them, I'd really appreciate if you will take a few minutes and complete my survey. Even if you don't think that you really match, but would like to know more, just let me know your contact information and I'd be happy to chat and tell you more about my product.

Please help me in my Customer Discovery process and fill out the survey: http://bit.ly/bDe4n7

Thank you.

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

Free to paid through obstacles

I'm facing a dilemma here and would like to ask for some advice.  

Say, I'm operating a resource, which was free for some period of time, has established community of users and monetizes through other means (ads, sponsors, etc).  Management has decided to start offering paid plans to users (although, with no good sounding plan on table, yet).  Meanwhile, I've spent some time researching the needs of visitors and came up with a list of things that would definitely make users happy.  

However, I'm hesitating to proceed with those changes, as the management is afraid that some of those changes (most of them being minor though) might be used as a tool to push users towards a paid plan.  And once they are offered free, the users might be less happy moving into paid, and would be angry to know that we're taking something away from them.

So, the question is: 

1. How should we deal with taking away something that was free (for a while) and making it for-pay, and 
2. Should we consider bundling up minor changes to make a good reason for people to upgrade their plans, while not offering much else?

Thanks!

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

Sign Up Forms Must Die

I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how such services work and why they should care enough to use them. I also believe we can do this without explicitly making them fill out a sign-up form as a first step.

via alistapart.com

An old (2008), but still actual post by Luke Wroblewski about new look at the sign up forms (still a way to go in 2010). He also has a section on gradual engagement solution, which implementation showed nice results in many companies (ie. Twitter).

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost

Quickie about Uservoice & KISSinsights

I had a chance to run few experiments with Uservoice (http://www.uservoice.com) and KISSinsights ( http://www.kissinsights.com/signup/bjfgaid).  Let me share the results with you.

Well, to start with, what is KISSinsights?  To quote the founders:

KISSinsights makes it ridiculously easy for you to ask questions and for your customers to answer them. [...] The surveys look pretty sweet, too.

Basically, that's it.  Nothing new, but the fact that KISSinsights was brought by the same team as KISSmetrics, which are quite known, gives them few extra points (or maybe not).

And Uservoice is sorta different thing (what you can't probably say from its tagline):

Your customers have great ideas. Are you ready to listen?

Typically, from the first sight, they should not be compared directly.  Uservoice is there for building communities, heating up discussions, cultivating ideas growth and soliciting (some) customer feedback.  KISSinsights is also can be good with ideas solicitation, and, basically, that's it.

However, I still found it reasonable to compare them. 

Few words about the setup.  I've run Uservoice for about a month on the majority pages of the site.  KISSinsights was installed on only one of the most visiting pages, appears only after 10 secs, asks only one question and doesn't show up (I believe!) for those who have already participated in it.  Oh, and one more thing, I'll be talking about free versions of both products.

Now, the results:

1. Uservoice has generated some amount of feedback within the first several days of being installed.  I believe this has something to do with early adopters, who can visiting the site often and reacting quickly to the changes occuired.   It started low, peaked on the next day or two, and then went down to nothing quickly after that.  KISSinsights was installed for just a few days, and started to generate feedback right away.  It started low, and than went gradually up on amount of feedback solicited.  As for now, after running for just a week (comparing to 5 weeks of Uservoice), KISSinsights has solicited three times more feedback than Uservoice.
2. No on was every bothered by Uservoice button (or did, but decided to stay quite on that).  However, we've received some amount of complaints for "annoying box" quickly after installing KISSinsights.  Frankly speaking, I still think this is good, because it's better be loved or hated, than be in the middle.
3. KISSinsights quality of feedback is much better, although my original impression was that Uservoice tends to make your visitors leave much more detailed feedback.
4. There is no way to follow up with visitors through the KISSinsights directly.  I don't know if this is good or bad, but you should sacrifice with something.  Otherwise, torturing visitors with email/registration forms, might drive the real value away - ideas and suggestions how to improve the product.  But Uservoice provides a decent mechanism to follow up with visitors.
5. KISSinsights allows to pass some information along aside with answers to survey.  Uservoice is quite limited on that.
6. I didn't observe any increase in bounce rate after installing either KISSinsights and Uservoice, but I found the average time spent on the page higher by 20% after installing KISSinsights.

In conclusion (which I'm hesitating to make, as I've just started experimenting with these products), I do see that "intruding" way of KISSinsights works better, even if it irritates some of the visitors.  And, generally, I am strongly believer that it's better to have emotions on the site, than the flat, emotion-less interest.  

I'm going to give both of them a longer run, and review them again.

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

Don't let you site slow down

via natishalom.typepad.com

Nice post on relation between the slowness of your site and page rank (and many business metrics, actually).

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost

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

Tone does matter

The more urgent, ‘take control’ tone of Version B’s copy lifted add-to-cart button clicks a whopping 93% over Version A’s comfort-focused tone.

via whichtestwon.com

One more interesting A/B test that only with a minor copy change (featuring a major tone difference though) brought up actions by 93% over the regular marketing shit.

Good to remember.

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost

Work'em Hard, Burn'em Out

Scrum is designed so developers can work 40 hour weeks. No more death marches. If we are now burning through good product owners, we have just shifted the constraint.

Scrum does not detail the product owner's relationship with the world outside the team. If one person cannot stay on top of all the details, presumably that individual is part of a marketing organization that can. Like all good developers, Scrum only defines the product owner / team interface. What happens on the enterprise side of that interface is someone else's problem.

via aplnoc.blogspot.com

Nice thoughts on Scrum' role that it plays in making a world with less burn-out (if it ever does).

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost

MailChimp's A/B test

“Online Training” wording increased clickthroughs from the support page to the webinar page 10.4%. More importantly, webinar attendees doubled the first week the winning navigation link went live.

via whichtestwon.com

MailChimp run a simple test by changing Webinars to Online Training. My first idea was that Online Training would convert better. And, as you can see, I was right.

Why? I can't tell you exactly, but I have a strong feeling that webinars are often attributed to negative or neutral experience, while training (either online or offline) is good.

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost

Minimum Viable Product @ Zynga

How Zynga Assesses Market Demand

- Create a 5-word pitch for a new product or feature

- Put it up on a high traffic webpage

- If it gets clicks, collect the emails of interested customers

- Build a ‘ghetto’ version of the feature

- Test everything

- Iterate constantly

via grattisfaction.com

Interesting comments on Mark Pincus' podcast on using MVP at Zynga.

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost

Engineering Your Way To Marketing Success

I visited Thomas Ptacek and the gang at Matasano (who are developing a firewall management product) over Christmas break and had a very productive discussion about marketing.  One of the things Thomas mentioned was that I should probably blog out how you can use engineering resources to improve your marketing.

via kalzumeus.com

Very interesting approach to marketing. Not much of engineering, but no doubts absolutely worth reading.

# 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

A/B to increase user engagement

The question becomes 'do you want a smaller, highly engaged community, or a larger, less engaged community?' There's no easy answer here; it's more of a think-long-and-hard sort of situation that greatly depends on individual aspects of your startup.

via blog.mixpanel.com

Great blog post on using A/B testing to increase user engagement and some conclusions made.

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost