Defining Success

[00:00:00]
>> Let's start with defining success, okay. How are we going to judge the success of our campaign and the validity of our business idea. We have a lot of different options of how we could do this, all right? And to a large degree, it's going to be down to what your comfortable with and what you feel is appropriate to your particular audience, right?

[00:00:24]
So I'm gonna show you all the various options that I've ever used doing this and I will leave it to you to make a judgment call of what you feel is most appropriate. One approach is the stay informed approach, right? So they head to the landing page and they hit the landing page.

[00:00:45]
It tells them all about the product, everything that you're gonna do, all the cool stuff that it's gonna involve. And then your call to action is follow for developments of whatever the product name is. And something like you'll get regular updates you'll get early access and you'll get heavy discount when the things launched.

[00:01:04]
So our call to action is sign up for a mailing list, right? Now, although this approach does provide a general sense of someone's interest in the app, it obviously doesn't indicate whether they actually would part with money if push came to shove, right? We can put the price of what the product will be on the page and so that will give you some indication because if people aren't signing up even to find out about it, then price might well be a factor.

[00:01:33]
But it's got limits to it fairly obviously. However, what it does give us is an opportunity to nurture that lead that person that fills in their email address, hopefully to encourage them to actually buy at the end of it, right? So it's kind of the worst option from accurately giving you a sense of how much this could work, right?

[00:02:00]
But the almost the best option in terms of nurturing an audience that we can sell to later. So typically, I would use this approach if I had an audience that was hypersensitive to any kind of feeling of being manipulated or were a super cynical audience. I'd probably use approach if I'm being honest with developers, for example, right?

[00:02:24]
You guys are very savvy, you're very switched on, you're very aware of things like dark patterns and you're quite opinionated about certain stuff and how you feel the web should work. So it probably would be my preferred approach with a group like you. There is a second approach, however, that I would be willing to use with developers that I think would work which is the waiting list approach, right?

[00:02:48]
So in this case, we are basically saying join the waiting list as we gradually roll out the product. Now, in truth that's creates this high sense of demand, right? Makes you think that the product has been super popular, so they're having to roll out the design slowly, which is, you could argue, a little deceptive as you haven't even started to build it yet, all right?

[00:03:14]
So as you can see, there is a moral element here of what you feel you're comfortable with in the situation. But it does still allow you to nurture the lead, right? Once someone signs up for the mailing list, you can still follow up, but you could consider it, as I said, to be slightly less honest about the state of the app and where it's at.

[00:03:35]
Now, another option is what I call the fake order approach, right? So in this scenario, what we're gonna do is we're gonna show it as if it is a real app, right? With a real product that's been launched, and we'll have a message like buy today for X amount, access all the features, secure early bird pricing, buy now for 20% off all the normal things you'd expect to see.

[00:04:05]
And then when someone clicks on that buy now button, it'll say something along the lines of unfortunately this has not yet been completed and we will be ready to launch soon. And you may then want to continue with follow up action of. But you can sign up to our mailing list to be informed when it goes live if you want, right?

[00:04:29]
Now offering the user option to buy. But then when you click yeah, you can form to sign up instead. It gives the most accurate of the buying experiences because someone is thinking they're actually really going to buy in there clicking on a button that says I am buying, right?

[00:04:46]
But obviously it could alienate some audiences. It's like wow, I thought it was buying and now it's I'm not and so you could pay people off in that process. So it's a judgement call, it's difficult. You will have got to know your audience by then and whether you feel that's appropriate and whether you feel it's something you can do.

[00:05:10]
There is a final option, which in some ways is more honest and straightforward with people. But you might be uncomfortable with it for other reasons, which is the preorder approach, right? So in this, we say, preorder today and save x amount to encourage people to do it and they actually enter their credit card information and that they preordered the product.

[00:05:37]
The money isn't taken just to be clear and we would need to make this clear on the landing page, the money is not taken from their account, right? It's literally preordered, okay? Gumroad, for example, supports this functionality. So you're not taking money from people because if you take money from people, then they'll start moaning if you're not faster enough turning around.

[00:06:02]
It turns into Kickstarter basically in crowdfunding, which I will come onto in a minute. So I'm not suggesting that, but what it does give you is a very accurate because they are committing to a sale now, right? Now, yes, they could write to you and cancel their preorder later and fair enough but essentially, it's as realistic as you can possibly get.

[00:06:25]
So you're allowing users to preorder a product normally for a heavy discount. I think it, you've got to, in some way offset the fact that they're not gonna get the product now in order to create the most realistic results. So offering a heavy discount is a way of kind of balancing that to get you a best idea of sales.

[00:06:44]
So it offers an actual buying experience, although the level will probably be a little lower than it would normally, depending on how big the discount is, right? So you can see how there are kind of different options of doing it. And there are pros and cons to these different options.

[00:07:04]
I'm actually, I'm very torn over it. I can't quite work out how I feel about this one to be entirely honest with you. And every time I do this test, I kind of go back and forth about what I'm comfortable with. Which is why I'm a bit reluctant to give you my advice here because I'm not 100% sure I'm sure of my advice.

[00:07:27]
I think in many ways the preorder option is quite a good one because it's upfront it says that it's not ready yet doesn't claim anything else. It's probably the most accurate because it most replicates a real sale. And so, it feels like the most honest approach to me at the moment but ask me again tomorrow and I might feel differently, yeah.

[00:07:54]
>> I personally love preorders.
>> Right.
>> But I'm an early adopter.
>> Yeah.
>> For me, I feel like I'm getting in on something.
>> Yeah.
>> Before everybody else does. And yeah, sometimes I feel like God, when am I ever gonna get that thing that I just preordered?

[00:08:10]
>> Yeah.
>> But I'm also wondering, are you suggesting also you could test all of these
>> You could do if you want to test.
>> For each one of them?
>> Yeah, it depends on how much effort you wanna put into the test campaign, but you could, yeah, you can run the order.

[00:08:23]
>> You could collect a lot of information from all of them, right?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
>> So for the person like me who likes preordering versus somebody else who is like, no, I just wanna be on the mailing list.
>> Yeah.
>> You're still getting both.
>> Yeah, absolutely snd that's up to you.

[00:08:36]
What you wouldn't be able to do is all of those things on a single landing page. You'd have to have multiple landing pages. But yeah, absolutely. I mean, there is one other option, of course, which is crowdsourcing, right? So you could use a platform like Kickstarter or Indigo as an option, I'm not a fan of that, if I'm honest with you.

[00:08:57]
I'm not a fan of it for a couple of reasons. Reason number one, is that I don't like taking people's money before I've got something to actually give them, right? And I've seen a lot of Kickstarter campaigns go horribly wrong, because people felt like they've been ripped off and that it's been a con and all of the rest of it.

[00:09:22]
So personally, I'm not a fan of it from that point of view. The other problem that I've got with them is that it's not solving the fundamental problem of, Having a sustainable way of targeting your audience, right? If you're using a crowdfunding platform, you're primarily using that crowdfunding platform as your lead generator, as your customer generator.

[00:09:56]
Now, you can use other methods as well, but it skews your results and gives a bit of a false impression of, whether you've got a sustainable business, in my opinion anyway. Finally as well, those platforms do tend to be err towards physical products with manufacturing costs associated with them rather than digital products.

[00:10:21]
So I probably wouldn't recommend that. But I'm not, if you could get it to work for you, knock yourselves out but that's just been my experience.