#wobbmy | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

joshteng · 9 years

Text

How we got 1000 sign ups in 7 days with no real product in place

"Stop thinking too much and be willing to spend some money."

So here’s the problem. You have an idea but you keep wondering how to get the word out. You spend time brainstorming strategies and listing them out. That’s great but I say forget that. I tried that countless time and all I ended up with are lists of to-dos. I don’t know about you but nothing is least exciting than that. The are no quick recipes for growth. But I believe the fundamentals to attempting growth is the same. It’s not just about the strategies themselves but the willingness of swift experimentations that works. A great marketer isn’t how brilliant he/she is but rather how quickly he/she is willing to try something out.

Ok. Screw the rhetorics, here’s how we did it.

We build a landing page that looks like this in one day

We best guess the message that will work for our demographic. (we tried our best to put ourselves in the shoes of our target demographic and read the messages and either said hell yeah or hell no to each). Put any of the hell yeahs as your message. (if you are more diligent, A/B test that shit out of your messages to see which converts best. We didn’t do that. We should have.)

Give people 2 choices and they will choose 1

Notice the buttons. We made our visitors feel like an idiot if they chose to not carry on with our sign up funnel. Humans are psychological creatures. Back when I did sales, my mentor gave me some great advice. He said “Don’t ask your lukewarm prospect when is she free to meet. Instead, give her 2 timeslots and ask her which works better for her.” There’s no shame in selling your vision. That golden piece of advice opened doors for me and increased my prospect conversion rate by more than 10 folds. So, I decided let’s bring that online. Give them 2 choices and they are more likely to choose at least 1. But there’s more, we decided to make the second choice a really dumb choice. (Not everyone will bite it, but dude, it’s good enough if most will). There are counter arguments (what doesn’t?) against this like giving your users an option to opt-out is a bad idea. I don’t know about that. We never got to test it. Important to remember. Different strategies work differently for different people. Do your homework. Implement metrics!

Invite-only, Queue, Referrals

After our visitors signed up, we created a queue (OMG! is this an incrementing random number generator? or did we actually got to 13k sign ups?) and made the early version of our product an invite only thing. It’s one of those jedi tricks that kinda works. Well, not always. It depends on your product and demographic. But it worked for us. We got some referrals though just a handful (I’m embarrassed to share the number). But hey free traffic is very much appreciated. I love that. Thank you very much.

Ads to drive some traffic

Building a product doesn’t automagically gets users. Once we got the landing page up within a day, we started doing Facebook ads. Here’s the tricky bit. Facebook ads are easy to put up. It’s easy to get likes and clicks that won’t convert. Our lesson learned, be as specific as we can be. Don’t be sloppy. Don’t just target the entire country or city. Do some research. Find out what your ideal demographic likes. What kinda pages they like or companies they are associated with. Target towns not cities. Target languages if applicable and not to mention a smaller age group. Don’t be greedy, it’s only counter-effective. A whole blog post can be written on Facebook ad targeting. But here’s a gist of it. Try it out for yourself. Don’t be stingy and expect users. We spent SGD300 on our campaigns. That puts as at SGD0.30 user acquisition cost. We can do better. But guess what! At least we got initial traction without breaking the bank! Or better still, we launched our product with users ready.

Takeaway

So here’s what you need to do. Build your landing page. And market it while you get back to building your product. Check back on metrics to see if you’re throwing money blindly.

Now, BE NICE and DOWNLOAD our app! http://wobb.my

Peace out. Still building a product people will love.

#wobb #marketing #startups #growth #wobbmy

2 notes · View notes