Does your idea suck? Test user acquisition in 5 days for $37
How making shit up can stop your procrastinating and kick your startup into high gear
The reality is most ideas for a startup, app or service are pretty sucky. But some are gems and some get made into billion dollar businesses. Here’s how you can test yours for $37 in 5 days. (NOTE: I use all the following services and DO NOT get paid to promote them)
My co-f0under and I are working on 3 different ideas and used these steps in the last 2 weeks with great success. Two ideas we’ve only had for a couple weeks.
Step 1: Give up on perfection and secrecy.
These steps only work if you’re willing to wing it and share.
Step 2: Come up with a name if you don’t have one.
Register a domain name at godaddy.com for $12 (sometimes $9 if you get lucy). Don’t worry at this point if you have to add “app” or some other word to the domain name or can only get the .us or .info etc. You can change everything later. Here’s a good blog on why your name or domain name doesn’t matter on Don’s Blog.
OPTIONALLY, if you want you can do a trademark search (called TESS) at the US Patent office at http://tmsearch.uspto.gov. Click on the link called “Basic Word Mark Search.” This will tell you if someone already owns the trademark.
If you are doing an app, search both play.google.com and the Apple’s app store to make sure another app doesn’t already have the name.
Step 3: Distill your idea into one catchy sentence.
Don’t worry about getting it right the first time. Spend no more than an hour on this otherwise you’ll ponder this one for days. Cost $0.
Here’s our personal examples:
- Hydden: “Hide secret messages in public videos.” (hydden.com)
- Photo Walk: “The First App That Lets You See Through The Eyes of Professional Photographers” (http://photowalk.tonetime.org/)
- Numtrix: “Teach your old phone number new tricks.” (numtrix.com)
Step 4: Create a few screenshots or photos of your idea.
You can do this with no design skills. I promise. Here’s some tools to help:
- Fake some screenshots: Photoshop can do wonders. If you don’t have it you can try it free for 3o days at (https://creative.adobe.com/products/creative-cloud). If you use the tools below the two things you need to know about photoshop are “layers” and how to type. Here’s a great video on layers (https://www.video2brain.com/en/lessons/understanding-layers).
http://speckyboy.com/2013/04/03/flat-gui-templates/ for cool templates. These are helpful for flat-design ideas.
http://www.teehanlax.com/tools/ for iOS templates.
2. Here’s some more tips about screenshots:
a. Keep the fonts simple. The font used by Apple on iPhone is Helvetica Neue (free download http://crossgraphicideas.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/helvetica-neue-font-free-download-complete-family/)
b. You probably only need a couple screenshots.
3. Hardware products?: 3D printing is cheap and you can build a decent prototype (http://www.incept3d.com/). NOTE: this adds to $37 and probably isn’t necessary at this step. You can often get away with a doctored photo.
STEP 5: Create a NEW gmail address
(I use ideaname@gmail.com). Add google analytics to this email. Go here http://www.google.com/ads/eig_s25g100/ and set up google adwords for this gmail. Google gives you $100 free when you spend $25.
STEP 6: Set up a free ONE PAGE website on either wix.com or squarespace.com.
You can use their templates or if you’re a tech guy, there are several free bootstrap templates you can host for free on AWS.
Check out our samples listed above (hydden.com, photowalk.tonetime.com, numtrix.com) to see how little you need on these pages. Numtrix has more because we actually had an Ad agency that already sold some by “mistake” so had to put more info on the page.
Add a contact email somewhere on the page, I use beta@myideasite.com
STEP 7: Add google analytics code to your page.
It’s easier than you think. Go to google.com/analytics, sign-in, click on admin and copy the code listed under “tracking code”.
STEP 8: Add a simple “call to action” on your landing page.
Your call to action can be for users to fill out a form, call a number (set up a free google voice number), or click a “purchase” button.
We tested 3 call to actions:
- Numtrix.com has a free sign-up page
2. Photo Walk has an email form to notify when app is ready
3. hydden has two links to app store. This probably isn’t allowed but we don’t care at this point. We just want to see if people will click on them.
When you click on the app store link, it does two things. 1) reveals the same email capture form:
…and 2) is adds an event in google analytics that tells us which button they clicked.
Here’s the code we added to the site:
Here’s where we see the event in Google analytics:
Step 8: Set up an adwords campaign.
Google makes this so simple to do. When you log into your new account (new account so you get the $100 free), go to the “tools tab” and “keyword planner.”
This will give you some ideas for keywords. The easiest way to get keywords is find a site that does something similar to yours. Type that in the “your landing page” field and Google will find relevant keywords.
Set up phrase match keywords
There are 3 keyword types in adwords (broad, phrase, exact).
Make sure you set up “phrase” matches for your test. They look like this: “instagram account” with the quotes.
Without the quotes (broad match), you’ll get too much traffic. Exact match-written with brackets [instagram account] gives you too little traffic.
Here’s an article from Google if you want more info on this.
Create text ads grouped by adgroups that are RELEVANT to the keywords.
Create a new campaign and an adgroup.
Tip 1: If you want just a super simple way to organize your test, create a new ad group for every new ad that doesn’t go with the keywords in that adgroup.
For example, for hydden we wanted to do an ad for snapchat and another one for whisper (both “secret” type services). We created two different ad groups because they keyword snapchat and whisper aren’t the same.
Google shows your ad based on your “bid” and how “relevant” both your ad and landing page are to the keyword. An ad with the word Snapchat is not relevant to the keyword “whisper.” So each time we had a new keyword that wasn’t like snapchat, we set up a new adgroup.
Tip 1b: Basically, it’s best to err on the side of too many adgroups to start because often your clicks will be cheaper.
It can take up to 24 hours for Google to approve your ad, but usually it’s much quicker.
Tip 2: Don’t use weird spaces or capitalization. One of our ads with the title “Photo Walk App” got disapproved because Google thought we were being funny with the caps on “Walk” and “App.”
Tip 3: We also ran some banner ads on youtube. Google will create quick free display ads for you like in the following screenshot and do a bunch of different sizes.
Tip 2: Set your bids pretty low. I usually start at about 75% of the recommended bid. On the keywords tab in Google Adwords make sure your ads aren’t always showing up as position “1" and “2". These positions are usually a LOT more expensive.
If you aren’t getting any clicks, make sure you’re bidding enough. Also click on the “ads” tab>status, arrow to make sure your ads are actually showing.
These ads aren’t showing cause we paused the campaign.
Step 9: Link your adwords account to Google Analytics
Go into analytics and click on the side tab “Acquisitions” subtab “Adwords.” The first time you do this it will tell you to link your adwords with your analytics. If you are using the same email for both, you just have to click the “allow access” button (can’t remembered exactly what it’s called but something like that).
Step 10: Start and babysit your Adwords Campaign
Launch your campaign with a $25 daily budget. See if users click on your ads and respond to your “call to action” on your landing page.
We also ran some facebook ads to facebook.com/hyddenvid. Maybe that will be a different article.
Step 11: Analyze your results
A lot of tweeking might be needed with the above steps. But once your satisfied with your ads and landing page, you can analyze your results. Normally anything less than 1000 clicks isn’t very “statistically relevant” but even after 100 clicks you can make some pretty good guesses.
By forcing yourself to distill your idea down to a simple landing page, you’ll have a better idea of how to position your product/app/service.
Tip: With 1 page landing sites, the “Time on Site” part of analytics can be pretty off. Add this code to your site to get more accurate results:
BONUS Step 12: Talk to real people
We also made some paper printouts of our screenshots. We went to Starbucks and talked to people and got them to fill out a survey that we copied mostly from this site https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/marketing-survey-templates/.
BONUS Step 13: Set up a Facebook page
Facebook pages are easy to set up. If you run any Facebook ads, it’s a “must do.” PS if you do run Facebook ads, I would go for “news feeds” ads. More on that in a later article. Our hydden page is Facebook.com/hyddenvid
Step 13: Abandon your idea or get moving on it
Seeing potential customers on your landing page is fun (I love watching the “Real Time Overview” tab of Google Analytics).
Your results are good if:
- lots of people click on your ads and the ads are cheap (you can always improve your landing page and message)
- visitors perform your “call to action” (anything less than 1% not good, anything more than 2% ok-good, anything over 20% where can I invest?
- visitors friend you on facebook
Your results are bad if:
- Your clicks cost a lot and what you sell doesn’t cover it. Basic math is 1%-3% of visitors will eventually buy something from you (if you do this right). For example, if each click costs $1.00 each “acquired customer” is going to cost you $33-$100 (100/3 and 100/1). This might be ok if they are going to keep buying stuff from you.
- Nobody does your call-to-action.
Of course none of the above is conclusive, but in just 2 weeks, my co-founder and I got some really relevant data.
Good luck on your idea!
If you have any questions or free help on any of this, you can contact me using a direct message on Twitter (twitter.com/viralmatic).
Shameless self-promotion:
You can read my other Medium articles here. You can also post your own startup stories to my collection http://www.medium.com/start-upwisdom/.
Also if this article was helpful to you will you please “recommend it” and tweet it and follow me on Twitter. Connect with me on LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/hughplautz/.
