3 ms·

I think the "Symptom: you're about to give up too quickly." should also be followed up with "Symptom: you're sticking with an idea that is dead" if you had 3,0

by vaksel 16y ago

I think the "Symptom: you're about to give up too quickly." should also be followed up with "Symptom: you're sticking with an idea that is dead" if you had 3,000 people come through your site, without a single sale, it's probably a good idea to try something else. it's very easy to delude yourself into thinking that you are a hockey stick case. "oh yeah, we've had 2 sales @9.99 this month...but remember the hockey stick...a year later, we'll have 5,000 sales a day!" if you are going to stick with an idea, you need to have consistent sales that are actually increasing. So that there is an indication that someone actually wants the product you have to offer. personally I take a 3 step approach to this. 1) get actual people to the site and see if it actually converts(2-3000 people is plenty). Once you find out your starting conversion rate(even if it's 1:2000) 2) then your goal is to scale up so you get decent traffic to the site...100-200 people a day at least. 3) then you start optimizing...run a multivariate a/b test every week with 3-4 variations. Discard the crap and keep the better converting ones. Keep doing this every week, and by the end of the year, you'll go through 100+ different variations, and your 1:2000 conversion rate, will most likely be down to 1:50-1:100. and with a/b tests you have to test EVERYTHING...don't leave anything to chance. You don't know your audience, until you actually test. You have no idea if you'll get more conversions with "buy" "buy now" "get it" "download it" "order" "order today" "give us your money" "stop being an idiot" or "insert coin"...not until you actually test it. For all you know that "stop being an idiot" order button will increase your sales 10 fold.

freshfunk 16y ago
I'm glad this was pointed out. Doing a startup is definitely like doing a dance. You have to know when to step forward, and when to step sideways and when to step back. Do it at the wrong time and you'll end up in pain. I know people who give up too quickly on an idea and I know people who stayed too long on an idea. The problem is usually that it's never so binary as to quit or keep going. It's easy to end up in a situation where you've spent 6 months or a year building a product. Over that next year you convince yourself that that NEXT feature is all that's needed for your product to explode. In the meantime you have a handful of users that give you validation that there's value to the idea. A/B testing would be great but there's also a saying that A/B optimization too early is also a mistake. Time could be better spent understanding product-market fit. Perhaps, more important than this was mentioned in the blog post:"spend a lot of your time thinking about customer acquisition (for me it's ~50%). Only very rarely will they come on their own early on."
deleted 16y ago
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by vaksel 16y ago

freshfunk 16y ago

I'm glad this was pointed out. Doing a startup is definitely like doing a dance. You have to know when to step forward, and when to step sideways and when to step back. Do it at the wrong time and you'll end up in pain. I know people who give up too quickly on an idea and I know people who stayed too long on an idea. The problem is usually that it's never so binary as to quit or keep going. It's easy to end up in a situation where you've spent 6 months or a year building a product. Over that next year you convince yourself that that NEXT feature is all that's needed for your product to explode. In the meantime you have a handful of users that give you validation that there's value to the idea. A/B testing would be great but there's also a saying that A/B optimization too early is also a mistake. Time could be better spent understanding product-market fit. Perhaps, more important than this was mentioned in the blog post:"spend a lot of your time thinking about customer acquisition (for me it's ~50%). Only very rarely will they come on their own early on."

deleted 16y ago

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