Good question! Lots of people don't know what we do from our site, but it's actually working pretty well at the minute; our conversion rate is 19% for that page! We've been trying to improve the copy but we haven't been able to beat it yet.
Basically; we started as a growth hacking agency and then built our own platform for keeping track of what we tested (and what worked). If you want a free trial + demo, just sign up on the site and we'll walk you through it.
Thanks! Yeah I agree; I'd still be happy if I never made the next Snapchat. I'd rather make little fun businesses that make money and can grow without too much insanity.
We just started by solving our own problems as a marketing agency. Eventually we found one that enough other people had (through this testing process).
Hey - author here. Fair point, all credit goes to the various 'lean' books; Lean Startup, Running Lean, 4 Steps to the Epiphany and Lean Analytics all come to mind when I think what inspired this. I didn't mention as I didn't expect anyone to think I invented these concepts, but I'll add a disclaimer. Cheers. :-)
Thanks for reading / commenting on the post. Just wanted to say I massively agree with you; it's exactly how we got started, and could afford to test these various business ideas and our agency business is what funds our tech. Everyone else has already mentioned the issues with focus, maker/manager schedule, etc, which are all valid in my experience.
However I have one more for you: the businesses that buy from you as a consultant are very unlikely to buy your product.
Why? Because if they need a freelancer / consultant / agency to do the work for them, they don't understand the work enough to do it themselves (or don't have enough time). Therefore any self-serve solution tends to be met with blank stares and confusion. Likewise, the people who use our product on a self-serve basis are typically not a good fit for our agency.
I'm sorry too, I kind of threw that in there without much thought. If I had to be more specific, I'd say that what you've done is really more like enshrining what you in particular have done at your company, without too much thought about what might be generally applicable.
For instance, the way you recommend a hyper-specific style of elevator pitching I think has basically no impact on success. Success with pitching is (according to my dumbass) way more about identifying who your actual audience is and why they care than about getting this perfect "pitch" correct. The discovery process around that is much harder and ambiguous than defining a pitch on paper.
Also, you have really specific stuff in there like "blast your contact list". I mean, okay, I think that might work for some people in some industries, but I don't think it's great advice for the median new founder. Neither is doing a CAC/LTV for a business when you haven't even figured out potential distribution much use, either.
Anyway, my longwinded point is that this is kind of culty. What makes cults what they are? I think it boils down to their unshakable conviction that their specific rituals are correct and their motivation to convince others of that. I don't think that "follow these specific actions and you will have a business" is advice that you can give in good conscience.
^^ super useful feedback, thanks for taking the time to explain and get more specific.
Generally, most people do NO (or very little) research, testing or thinking about their business idea before investing significant resources into it. My aim was to get them thinking, even if my way isn't the best. If I can help them avoid analysis paralysis and just DO something that moves their dream of starting a business forward, without risking too much money and time, then I'm happy. :-)
With over 10k words I didn't have the time (or frankly, energy) to dive too deep into any one topic. For example elevator pitching, which could be a 10,000 word blog post in itself. Happy to provide links for further reading though if you have any specific resources you find useful?
I actually think the culty thing is kind of a compliment; some of the most successful companies are kind of cultish and many great marketers talk about building 'Tribes' (e.g. Seth Godin). Maybe I just absorbed a bit too much of Noah Kagan's charisma when I worked at AppSumo, I dunno. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is a bigger topic again, but in my experience rather than 'optimizing' (investing a lot of time choosing the best possible path) it's much more efficient to 'satisfice' (invest less time and choose a good enough path). Does it really make that much difference which elevator pitch format you use? Or is it more important that you actually do write one? Providing multiple options would only scare most people away because it's too hard to pick.
Hope that's useful background / partial justification for cultiness. ;-)
Hey, author and one of the co-founders here, michael taylor. Thanks for checking us out and taking the time to comment! We definitely are standing on shoulders of giants here; I sleep with Lean Startup under my pillow. We just saw this blowing up on HN and I'm personally pretty excited because it's the first time I've had anything on here. Didn't even expect it as a marketer, so that's awesome.
We've actually just hired our 15th person and for the past 2 years we've worked with 70+ startups and spent around $2m. That's not counting one client who spends about $40k a day on FB ads. Before that I worked at Efficient Frontier (now part of Adobe), Travelzoo and ShopStyle. In each place I managed or optimized multi-million dollar budgets; the learnings from which I applied whilst building our playbook, and I apply every time I write a post.
ROI for our playbook is calculated based on the average of the experiments we've run. Looking at the numbers we've averaged about 2 concluded tests per tactic, but those numbers are highly skewed; there are some that have run 10+ times, others that have never 'run' (just things I've tried before but don't have conclusive data to hand, or things I've read about in blog posts). Either way, this data should be taken with a pinch of salt and used directionally; while eventually we dream of being able to build a recommendation engine that auto-prioritizes these tactics, the reality is that we'll need a lot more people using the system (hence the incessant blogging). :-)
My advice as a nobody who's done nothing except be cynical on the internet:
* Have a page for your team to show the size of your business. It adds a lot of legitimacy in an often slimy, fly-by-night industry.
* Advertise that you've worked with 70+ startups. I had assumed this was a fairly new landing page for a two-person project who struggled to get three clients so they could put up a case-studies page. Obviously this isn't the case.
* You spent $2m of your own money that could otherwise be in your personal bank account right now? Or $2m of clients' money? Because there's a pretty big difference, and it's blatantly misleading if you meant the latter. It would be accurate to say "We've managed the spending of millions of dollars" if that's the case.
* Having a percentage ROI attached to a tactic suggests a degree of accuracy of at least 1%. That's obviously not the case. These are, as you described, calculated from statistically insignificant data or complete guesses. Maybe just consider a 1 through 4 ranking system of importance.
* Have meaningful content in your case studies. Be more specific. Give concrete examples.
Of course, maybe these changes aren't what sells a client on your services in this industry. My advice would definitely make for a more honest, less-bullshit website, but it might not make for a more profitable company. Just don't expect a warm reception on social media sites, especially ones like HN that are known for cutting through the bullshit.
That said, you handled the shit I threw at you very well.
* Client's money. We've spent about $20k of our money over the past six months or so. I would argue we're even more on the hook when it's someone else's money (and we do a lot of design / content marketing in house, that you may normally pay for externally), but I definitely take your point.
* Also fair point, but some data is better than no data IMO (otherwise how do you prioritize this massive list?). Open to suggestions though!
* Yeah we do try to; are you talking blog post now or playbook? We see our blog posts as living, dynamic products in their own right; we plan to update this with more useful information (and edit it down to remove unnecessary info) over time.
* We actually get that feedback all the time. "I don't know what you guys do, but it looks cool" is like the main line we get when we talk to leads. However, the site converts at 19% (seriously) and we haven't been able to beat it yet by being more informative. Working on it!
<tips cap> I'm relishing people actually caring enough to take the time to (fairly) criticize us. Much better than languishing in obscurity. :-)
>Also fair point, but some data is better than no data IMO (otherwise how do you prioritize this massive list?). Open to suggestions though!
Like I said, just have a 1 through 4 system. 1 being most important (or vice versa). It's roughly the level of accuracy you have already, and it accurately portrays that these are estimations/opinions, not actually data-driven numbers.
Thanks for a great write-up. I agree with most of the business tips but one thing you omitted is possible conflicts with your existing job over intellectual property and solicitation of either customers or employees. Most employment agreements include things like assignment of inventions and non-solicitation as standard terms.
Conflicts of this kind would be a good reason to quit before you get too deeply into research, which goes against the title of the post.
* Do this on your own time. Maintain separation and document as necessary
* Make sure that you did not sign anything as part of your employment agreement that claims ownership over your ideas, thoughts, inventions, data etc. outside of working hours
IANAL2 (but I read a lot of contracts), here are a couple more:
* Read your assignment of inventions agreement _very_ carefully.
* If you live outside of California check your employment agreement for non-compete provisions.
If in doubt consult a labor lawyer. Getting qualified legal advice when starting a company is worth the money.
Off topic, but can you fix that bug that makes your site create a popup when a user highlights text. I have trouble tracking text and use the highlight to read faster. Your site is completely unreadable to me.
