Chapter 5 Creating Traction Experiments
Creating Traction Channels:
How to design your traction experiments
Take a deep breath! We’re on our way to testing your first traction channels. You just created a prioritized list of all the ways you think you can drive traction and get paying customers for your business. It’s time to break those experiments into bite-size tasks and gather some evidence.
But first, it’s important that we all adopt a couple of mindsets.
- If you had to make money with this idea tomorrow, what would you do?
I always push myself to think of the fastest way I can turn an idea into customer revenue. This also goes for testing traction experiments.
Before almost every single piece of content, I write I’ll do a Facebook post in one of my Facebook groups and see how many people comment and like the post. This is a great chance to step back and make sure you are ‘present’ on any and all channels that are a networking opportunity for you.
You’ll use these channels to seek advice, engage your audience, build your brand, test and showcase your expertise and know-how. Make the most of these opportunities for yourself and your company. In today’s world especially for early startups and young companies, an individual is the brand and vice versa.
Turning our attention back to the post, this post is a shortened version of the content I want to create. This might even be a simple question like “Do you face X problem?”. If no one responds, then that’s a sign no one in that group cares about that problem/question. BUT, if you get tons of engagement then you are onto something.
Go forth and write that article and then direct message it to the people who engaged with your post.
I did this to build our entire gozeroto1 course.
I’ve already taught this curriculum to 100s of entrepreneurs through my work as an educator and consultant across Fortune 500 companies, accelerator programs and beyond. With demand from all over the world, it made sense to build it for an online audience and bring it directly to you.
I practice what I preach, I started testing my content ideas with simple Facebook posts. After that, I did a mini version of the course and threw up this landing page.
This simple landing page had an 82% conversion rate! WOW, talk about validation. With my expectations exceed I was confident that committing the time and energy to build out the full course would be worth it.
This probably sounds counterintuitive but it’s the right way to go. First coined by Paul Graham, do things that don’t scale means find a way that you can deliver value to your customers in a manual way.
Be like the wizard of OZ. Set up a landing page that looks like what you ultimately want to be. Envision what you are striving for and build your landing page accordingly. Mention your awesome technology or finished product and then manually execute and deliver. Let’s say you want to make a lead gen service that finds targeted email lists of prospective customers based on your client’s customer profile.
There are already tons of services you could leverage to get these emails for your customer. You can build a simple landing page that has a form for your customer to fill out to describe the type of leads they want. Once the fill out that form, they’ll see a payment page that you can then use to collect $$. Once they pay, go and sign up for a free trial of one of your competitor’s services download a spreadsheet of leads and email it to your client.
It’s that simple. Value delivered. Along the way, you’ve just learned about the specific questions they ask while you’re processing their order and you’ve proven that you can convert paying customers!
Entrepreneur’s Mindset.
Personally, it helps me to write about my experiments. I don’t often make these public but it’s good for me to use internally with my team. We always use the Entrepreneur’s Mindset when documenting our experiments.
Here’s what I thought (Hypothesis statement)
Here’s what I did (Experiment design)
Here’s what I learned (DATA and INSIGHTS!)
Here’s what we’re doing next (Always move forward! Persistence is the great equalizer:)
How can I do this tomorrow
Challenge: RUN THREE EXPERIMENTS IN THE NEXT 3 DAYS so that you can get some customer feedback.
Post your results to the FB group
