Startup Journey: Update 4

We’re a few days in and the ambitions to write a post every single day made room for a more realistic pace. It certainly won’t get better as we’re expecting our third child somewhere in the next few days.

From now on I will write an update each time I have something to say.

is 12% conversion too high ?

In my last update I shared a link to a draft/landing page. I set this up to collect some emails and find out if people are interested in this idea at all.

In the first few days I collected about 50 email addresses. The odd thing about this is that I am hitting a 12% conversion rate on this form.

That is high compared to what I’ve seen in other projects. Although the sample size is small (low traffic on the website) something has to be off.

Looking at the first signups I noticed a lot of yahoo/gmail accounts.

Not really surprised by the gmail accounts but what’s with all @yahoo’s ?

Also note the low amount of company/startup emails. Sure I wasn’t hoping to get @uber or @buffer.com emails in there I am doubting the general quality of the harvested list.

Quality over Quantity

The common approach to validate a startup idea is setting up a landing page with an email collecting honeypot. The idea is that when the product is ready those emails can be used for a big bang launch.

After reading up on this subject I found out there is a big flaw with this strategy:

By skipping the “coming soon” page, you can really focus on what matters. Instead of a “coming soon” page, put up a landing page for your product. Make it look like the product exists, and then when people try and sign up, show them a page letting them know that you’re not quite ready for them yet.

Source http://joel.is/coming-soon/ by @joelgascoigne

Coincidentally at the same time I bumped in to a discussion in the #startup slack community circling around the question:

Is a landing page an Minimum Viable Product ?

I guess it’s all in the definition of MVP, but there was an interesting insight by @Clogish:

Quality over quantity right ? For LiveSlack that means that we need to be sure that visitors who convert are really interested in the product.

How to solve

Agreeing with the points made (by people a lot smarted than me). I am playing with a few ideas to increase the quality of the emails:

• ask for money upfront ? With a refund possibility in the next 6 months
• ask for the Slack API (bot user) key when they sign up
• sign up through Slack Authentication (OAuth) only
• make a real sign up form. After completing the form we tell the user we are not done yet. This does feel a bit jerky ?

Will change the landing page as soon as possible to make sure visitors show a little more intent before I call it a conversion.

Slack branding guidelines

I got an email from Slack:

While I’m emailing you, we noticed you’re working on a product called “Liveslack”. I realize it is still in early development, but I thought it’d be best to let you know about a few things now, instead of waiting until you’ve spent more time on it:

Firstly, the page you currently have at http://liveslack.com/ breaks many of our Brand Guidelines. The biggest problem is that your name and logo confuse your brand with ours, but there are many other smaller issues. You should come up with a different name and brand for your product, it’ll make us happy, but it’ll also be better for you in the long term.

Secondly, your site does not make it clear that this service is not operated by Slack; in fact it does the opposite. You need to make it clearer who is running it, and that Slack offers no support or endorsement of your product.

Lastly, you should know that public Slack channels are a feature we’re planning on building soon. I don’t think this will be exactly the same as your current idea, but I don’t want you to be surprised when this happens.

Shit. I should’ve seen that coming! After spending the next 10 minutes reading their guidelines I must say I understand their position.

Do not register a domain containing “slack”, misspellings, transliterations or similar variations thereof. That would be very uncool.

- Slack brand guidelines

Liveslack.com is uncool. Will take a few days to let this sink in.

Attention for detail

On a side note: Most brand guidelines are semi-legal documents stuffed with jargon you need to read 5x to make sense of. The slack brand guidelines are very well written, funny and easy to understand.

The fact that Slack puts a lot of effort and detail into release notes or brand guidelines just makes people love the brand even more.

Following up on a slack invitation I have scheduled a call with the director of platform to talk about this. More on that soon.

This is a post in a series of “Startup Journey” posts. It all started with “Is this idea worth exploring?”. All posts are listed in “Startup Journey” publication.