To validate I’m building the right thing I wanted to build the product packaging first and measure interest. I built a landing page with an early access sign up form but I hadn’t even started on building the product. The goal was to then reach out to my sign ups and see if I could get some to do a quick interview to get a feel for things like how prospects currently solve their problem, keywords they’ve searched in the past for solutions, their expectations what they’d get when they signed up, how much they’d be willing to pay, etc.
SEM campaign
I didn’t really want to invest too much money in running Google ads so I only spent $45 over a few days with a cost per click cap of about $1. I got 8 sign ups and reached out to each of them individually. None of them replied.
In hindsight the low budget I set was pretty naive. The leads I got were all from India and just Gmail addresses as opposed to legitimate businesses.
Beta list
I was putting more hope into Betalist and assuming the quality of leads would be better. I got 13 sign ups and sent emailed all of them. No one replied.
What went wrong?
It’s a little hard to know the problem when no one replied (although I have similar issues with new Bookly installs when I reach out). I switched to Mailchimp for my email campaigns before Betalist launched so I had better metrics. The open rate was 39% and the click through rate was 4.3%…so there’s that.
Some other theories of the low success rate:
- For SEM I need to spend a lot more money to get quality leads. It’s typically about $20 per click for my targeted keywords in the U.S. If I want to be serious about running a business I need to spend more up front.
- For my 39% open rate it’s possible a lot of my emails are going straight to spam. I might need to work on getting my domain authority up first.
- It’s a numbers game. 21 sign ups isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things. The average sign up rate for a working product is 2.35% so I would imagine I’d need a lot more beta sign ups before I reach someone interested in doing an interview.
- Users might have signed up thinking they were going to get immediate access to some bare bones product. If I was searching for a solution to a current problem and someone reached out to me for an interview instead, I probably wouldn’t reply either unless I was really invested in the messaging I read on the landing page.
Next steps
The only thing I’ve really been able to prove here is that there’s some search intent for the keywords I’ve targeted and the messaging my landing page conveyed. I promised myself I wouldn’t build anything until I had done some qualitative research first and validate I’m solving a worthwhile problem…but here I am now building an MVP.
In all honesty, I need to work on cold outreach more and get some interviews in, but in parallel I’ll be building a product suggestion board and measuring adoption to validate product-market fit. Once I have something built I’ll return to SEM with a larger budget.
I really don’t want to fall into the build traps that got me in the past. I have a framework that will help me with this but that’s for the next post.