Idea Invalidated.
The journey of an entrepreneur
We all have awesome ideas, and sometimes we feel like our ideas are sooo good that they don’t need validation, that we should keep them to ourselves and spend the time to make them perfect before showing a single soul.
But how do we know if anyone really cares? Even if people say they like the idea, would they use it? will the idea achieve its goal? and even more importantly, would customers pay for it?
In this post I’ll take you through part of the journey I (and my now cofounder Ionut) have taken at the TechPeaks accelerator over the past couple of months from ideation to design, user interviews, and finally the MVP we developed, along with results. You’ll see why it’s important to validate your idea, and how you can end up with something even better — like Drystorm.co which is what we’re working on now ;)
A revolution in online marketing for bloggers
A few months ago I had an idea. Not just any idea, but an idea that would BLOW YOUR MIND.
The problem:
Imagine you’re a blogger. Every week you create a new post, you spend hours and hours writing it up, and then you try to get traffic to it. In order to advertise your post you send out a link to your twitter, facebook, google+, pin your photos on pinterest, and submit the post to relevant sites such as Food Gawker, Craft Gawker etc.
The traffic you drive however is mostly the same traffic — surely there must be a more effective way to promote yourself, to drive more traffic, and to get new followers?
The idea
Every blogger has a following on various social networks, but it sits there under-utilised most of the time.
What if bloggers were to take advantage of the networks of their peers (other bloggers) — what if there were a service that would help them promote one another, where they could earn points for promoting others, and could ‘spend’ those points in order to promote themselves?
If we were to implement a slight imbalance in the system — if it cost you more points to promote yourself than the points you’d get for promoting others, then we could sell the imbalance in the points system to businesses wanting to advertise themselves via bloggers. The effect would be amazing! Bloggers would get more traffic, would have relevant content to put on their social networks, and we would be able to help relevant businesses advertise themselves (and we would make money as a result)!
This is how XPromote.me (cross promote me) was born.
Getting to work (or so you think…)
When you have an awesome idea it’s important to make it perfect. You should think the concept through thoroughly, consider all the use cases, determine how you can scale your marketing, and start designing what your product should look like, and how it should work.
Well… I guess that’s what I was thinking…
Which was wrong.
But it’s what I started doing, and so below I’ll give you the steps you should follow if you want to fail in a more spectacular way than what’s necessary.
Step #1 Design your awesome product
I’m lucky to have a web designer as a friend. So I did a bit of dev work for his startup x-ray.io, and he did a bit of design for our startup XPromote.me.
Here’s the outcome (Great work Pete!)
(I actually put together this one, so don’t blame Pete for the off-centering)
Looking pretty good so far right!
Step #2 Determine your large scale marketing strategy
If you’re serious about your startup you need to be able to build up a huge number of users fast. I mean, that’ll let you talk about week on week growth, and will get investors excited so that you can take their money, and spend the next X years of your life building out your awesome product.
So how do we find all these bloggers?
Well luckily for us Bloglovin exists! They’ve conveniently grouped bloggers into categories for us — which would help us with the match making (who promotes who), and with a bit of fiddling about in their html, javascript I quickly figured out how to scrape their ass.
With a bit of coding we were well on our way to being able to scrape Bloglovin, get all the blogger details (who follows who, blog address, name etc) along with what categories they were blogging about. This would help us to match up relevant bloggers so that they can promote each other.
The plan was to create another scraper which would visit each blog, gather contact details / fill out forms etc, and email them, letting them know that we had already created an account for them, passing along their login details.
Feeling confident that it was possible to reach bloggers at scale, we decided to get started collecting signups from people.
Step #3 Create a custom landing page
If you’re a developer, it’s definitely not cool to use a landing page service. I mean how are you supposed to build the rest of your product on top of a landing page service?? (We are solving this problem with Drystorm.co by the way ;))
So we built our landing page in Rails, complete with a short questionnaire, and started letting people know about our service (reddit, personal contacts, people that signed up to my previous idea).
A revelation
At this stage, we had designed and built a good number of things. It wasn’t until we started getting people signing up to the landing page that we started learning.
We quickly learnt that a lot of people signing up had… well they had pretty shitty blogs (sorry, but it’s kinda true). And it wasn’t our goal to help promote shitty blogs — the internet is full of enough crap as it is.
So now we had a new requirement — we needed to match bloggers together who had a certain level of quality where the content was focussed around a similar topic area (e.g. food and crafts).
Talking to your users
This is when we really started talking to our potential users. I have a blogger friend, and so started to talk to her more about the types of people she would be happy to promote, and who she follows on Bloglovin.
I also started to reach out to the people who are in her blogger circle — bloggers in the US, the UK, Germany, and had google hangouts with each of them.
We learnt that bloggers are very protective of their social networks, about the types of content that they promote, and who they promote. We learnt that bloggers don’t always follow blogs that they like exactly, sometimes it’s just that they’ve met someone in person or they’ve formed a relationship with a commenter, and it’s an act of courtesy. We learnt that bloggers already have ways of promoting each other — they are self-organising — they run giveaways using tools like RaffleCopter where each blogger contributes a few dollars towards an item to give away, and entrants get points for following each blogger involved in the giveaway.
A positive point when talking to these bloggers was that they were interested in what we were doing, and said that they’d be willing to try out our service.
Things were looking a bit more tricky, but still positive ☺
The MVP (minimal viable product)
About this time, we started to realise that all the ‘work’ — all the coding, design etc we had done so far hadn’t really helped us in any way. This time, we started thinking hard about how to run an MVP without getting into coding.
It was hard — we initially thought about creating a simple page on our site which would tell a user who they had to promote, where they could copy and paste text they had to promote, and put it into their twitter / buffer feed manually.
We thought about it a little more, and then decided that actually we didn’t need a dashboard at all — we could achieve the same thing by simply emailing people.
Getting MVP Users
We knew that the bloggers who had taken part in the giveaway (shown above) were likely to be open to promoting each other’s content.
We had also already spoken to some of them, so had a certain amount of trust in the group already. We manually went to each of the blogs in the giveaway and searched for email addresses / forms where we could reach the bloggers — this was surprisingly not too difficult.
Here’s what I emailed to each of them:
Subject: Blog Traffic Idea ☺
Hey PersonX,
My name is Louis, I’m currently in Italy at a startup accelerator, and had an idea for helping bloggers increase the traffic to their blogs. I’ve had Skype sessions with bloggers such as Person1 from Blog1, Person2 from Blog2, and they have been super positive about the idea, and I thought I should reach out to you about it too!
The basic idea is to form a group of like-minded bloggers that produce excellent content, and to cross promote each other’s content on social media channels. The role I’d play in this is to coordinate this interaction, and to ensure that the system is fair — i.e. that everyone promotes and gets promoted evenly.
I’d like to run a trial version of the system using email, and would be super happy if you would choose to be part of the trial. It really won’t take much time, and my hope is to demonstrate that we can increase your, and other’s blog traffic with minimal effort on your part.
Let me know if you’d like to participate in the trial, and if so, I’ll send details on how it will work?
All the best,
Louis
p.s. let me know if you have any questions / thoughts ;)
We used a spreadsheet to track who responded, and what their status was in terms of being involved in the MVP.
We ended up with about a 30% success rate for getting people interested in participating in the MVP, and contacted around 40 people by hand. This left us with around a dozen people that could participate in the MVP — which was enough for what we wanted to test.
Running the MVP
We decided that it was important to have an outcome for the MVP. We wanted to test two assumptions:
1. Bloggers will promote one another 2. The promotion will drive significant traffic
We wanted to make it as easy as possible to test these two things, so we decided that we’d kick things off by producing the actual tweet content that the bloggers would promote.
We produced another spreadsheet where we paired up the bloggers with the content that they would be promoting.
Ionut did a bit of coding in the actual spreadsheet itself to hook into bit.ly in order to dynamically generate unique urls for each bit of content being promoted by a specific user. This allowed us to see who was promoting who, and told us how many visits we managed to drive to a blogger’s site.
We assigned each user 5 different bits of content to promote, and tried to evenly distribute the content out to bloggers. We then sent emails to each of the bloggers with instructions on what they were to do next.
The emails we sent out looked like this:
Hey Person, welcome to the blog cross promotion trial!
Below you’ll find content from other bloggers that you can help promote across your FB / Twitter / Google+ etc.
Simply copy and paste onto a social network / buffer / hootsuite, and that’s it! You can change the text, just make sure that you keep the same bit.ly link, as we’ll use this to see who promotes who etc.
Here’s the content:
#1 from blog1
I love it when other bloggers open up, always interesting to hear about their lives! bit.ly/xyz
#2 from blog2
Truly amazing writing #jealous bit.ly/abc
#3 from blog3
What do Gnomes, old-school typewriters, and toolboxes have in common? bit.ly/bcd
#4 from blog4
A delicious, healthy meal for those of us that are super busy! bit.ly/cde
#5 from blog5
It turns out there’s more than one way to get inside the circus! bit.ly/def
If you have any thoughts / questions, get in touch! We really love hearing from you!
Happy promoting,
Louis
Results
It was great to be able to see the clicks live in the spreadsheet, and we were able to quickly see how well the MVP was working.
It turns out that the bloggers were indeed willing to promote one another, but when we looked at the amount of traffic that was generated from the MVP, we were disappointed.
As you can see, with 9 bloggers promoting 5 pieces of content each, the most traffic that a blogger got was 17 visits.
We wanted to offer a service which was driving a good amount of value with minimal effort. With the amount of traffic we created combined with what the bloggers told us — that they care what content they promote, we concluded that the service just didn’t look like it was going to work.
Complete automation didn’t look like it’d be welcome, the click-through rates were too low, and the bloggers didn’t have big enough audiences to make the numbers work. We did reach out to bigger bloggers, but found that bigger bloggers are so busy with their blogging, book launches and what not, that they didn’t have time to try out a service like ours.
To really put a nail in the coffin, I was interested to see how long it would take before one of the bloggers contacted us to get an update on what was happening. After about 3 or 4 weeks one person asked.
It seems that the bloggers aren’t so disappointed if we don’t exist, and that’s OK — we learnt what we needed to from the MVP — that we should do something else.
Conclusion
I’m an entrepreneur, and I love to dream big. I love to think of how the world could be, and to think of solutions to problems that could make the world a better place. But my head isn’t the real world; and it’s not until we start reaching out to other people that we start to fill in the gaps of our reality, and start to validate or invalidate the assumptions we have.
We wasted a good amount of time creating designs that were never used, writing scalable software that was never needed. It’s too easy to do, and too easy to slide into your area of comfort to feel like you’re accomplishing something.
Sometimes we need to run tests to (in)validate our ideas. It’s all too easy to complicate the situation, to try to think of pretty solutions that are self-service solutions. When you start thinking you need to create a piece of software to test something, stop and think again. Sometimes it takes just a little bit of thought and a little more creativity to figure out how you can test something without having to touch a line of code. Sometimes an MVP can be a phone call, an email, or a pad and a pen.
Lastly, entrepreneurship takes time, and a lot of perseverance. You will have ideas that don’t work out, and that’s OK. It’s better to have them not work out quickly, and to move onto the next idea. We’re on our 4th idea we’ve had at TechPeaks, and still need to go through the validation process properly for our latest business Drystorm.co.
I’d like to say a big thank you to the blogger community who were very welcoming, and open to working with us in doing the trial service ☺. It can be scary reaching out to people, but I think when you frame things in a way which gets across that you’re trying to help others, then people do open up to you.
If you’re interested in what we’re doing next, check out Drystorm, we’re working hard on validating the service, and have had some awesome feedback so far!
Thanks for reading, I look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments.
Cheers,
Louis
