Archive for the ‘ Experiments ’ Category
Came up with a fun idea that may have some viral potential. It also passes one good smell test – I want to use it. Anyways it’s only going to take me a few days to throw together, but I’m heading out of town for 10 days starting Tuesday, so I won’t be able to launch it until I get back.
Curious to see how it plays out (curiosity is driving a lot of my decisions these days interestingly enough).
When we tell people we’re building 4 products simultaneously, none of which are close to being finished, the immediate assumption is that we’re trying to throw products against the wall to see what sticks.
This isn’t the case.
It is unlikely that we will ever shut down any of our products.
We’re simply trying to figure out what the right formula is for making each product stick. And we don’t want the products to be too heavy and bloated until we’ve found that perfect minimum product that does stick.
We believe in the story and the value of each product. Getting it to stick and grow and achieve the critical mass necessary to make the product truly valuable is a different story, though. That is why we are focusing on the fundamentals of each product, the minimum viable feature set, to make sure we’ve got that right before expanding on it.
Already with TheMatchingGame.com we went too far and are considering doing either a massive re-factoring or possibly even completely rebuilding it to simplify it down to that minimum set of features that are the foundation for the overall experience. As it is, all of the features we built that we thought we needed are making it harder for us to push forward now that we have better perspective on what is important.
Of course if we try for years and can’t get something to stick we may think about shutting it down, but we’ve been careful to choose products that require minimum maintenance and can run cheaply, so we can simply let a product run. This allows us to both to think about the product (maybe a brilliant idea comes to us in 6 months about how to make it click) or simply give it a longer time to hit the necessary inflection point where the size of the community makes the product valuable enough to stick.
We launched Secret Goals last week and ran a few campaigns on StumbleUpon, driving traffic to the site, and recording how people navigated the site using Clixpy.
We immediately realized that our registration page sucked.
Everyone hit it and just stopped right there.
And then we thought, “Why have a registration process at all?”. We need to collect at least an email from people so that they can come back to the site and log in or we can email them a link to log in through, but beyond that we didn’t need any more information.
So why not ask people for their email in the context of setting up their goal? Explain to them why we need their email address and what emails they should expect to receive, all within the context of creating the goal, with no other registration process.
We tried it out (see before and after images below). In our first test we sent 100 people to the site and no one registered. In the second test we sent 100 people to the site and 2 people registered.
It’s not exactly the biggest win ever, and the results are very anecdotal (welcome to startup life), but we like the feel of it a lot more now and the fact that people are signing up at all is a big deal for us at this stage of the product’s life.
Before
After
We’ve just launched secretgoals.com and it’s far from complete. I think we would even consider it somewhat embarrassing.
Why Not?
Well it’s embarrassing for one. People who use the product right now are probably going to be disappointed. There isn’t that much functionality, the functionality that is there is half-complete, and we’re not yet satisfied with the design and user flows. If we do get anyone to register we’ll probably lose them rather quickly just because there’s not much to do on the site yet.
Why?
We’re trying to push ourselves to validate our assumptions early on. We can launch early, use clixpy.com to see what people are doing on the site, and make better decisions about what to prioritize, hopefully allowing us to get to the right product a lot faster.
It’s hard to look past the embarrassment, but we need to be efficient. We need to figure out what people are engaged by on the site and where people are getting confused. We learned from our efforts on TheMatchingGame.com that we can’t rely on our own assumptions without frequently validating our ideas. We spent way too much time on TheMatchingGame.com building features that were complex and made the site more complicated, but had little impact on the way people used the site. Had we been more incremental in our approach and less afraid of embarrassment we probably could have saved ourselves a month of work.
How’s It Going?
We’ve just launched it and ran our first test. Already we’ve identified one page on the site (the page for a new goal that no one has take on yet) that is just killing everyone’s experience. Right now it just looks like a registration page, which may be suggesting to people that you have to register in order to do anything on the site.
We’re going to focus on changing that page now and then run another test. We’ll let you know how it goes.
I’ve been a little up and down on the lean startup methodologies. I think that testing user flows, doing A/B testing, getting feedback, etc. is all great stuff, but can become distracting. We did a lot of it when we launched TheMatchingGame.com and eventually found ourselves spinning our wheels testing all sorts of variations with little to show for the efforts.
So we pulled back on it, but didn’t give up on it completely. We decided to focus our attention on the front page and try to refine the message so that people understood better what was happening on the site.
Well, after a few iterations, we seem to have hit on a design that did have a significant impact. Here’s the before:
and the after:
And the results:
Immediately we saw an increase in people joining the site and adding their photos. Looking at our stats for the last 24 hours and we see that the percent of people coming to the site that join jumped from:
Same Day Last Week: 3.6%
Today: 9.1%
Overall Average: 4.8%
It’s amazing what a difference a simple change can make.
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