A Story About Wasting Thousands On A Rebrand and Website Without Doing In-Depth Customer Testing First.
This is the story of a business that spent too much money before they knew it would work. And it happens all too often.
The client was in the security equipment business and had a great new idea of how they could bundle their equipment into several packages, offer additional upsells during a custom designed and built checkout process, with optional self-monitored or premium managed-monitoring add-on features, etc etc.
After spending thousands of dollars on a whole new rebrand, and that much more on a new website with a ‘cool’ online checkout process (it was good!), launching it and spending money on an ad campaign… they realised the model wasn’t working.
The pricing was off.
The bundles were wrong.
The upsells were too much.
What seemed like a good idea in theory, in reality, didn’t work for customers.
This is just one story, but I’ve seen, read and heard about this time and time again.
Now, I’m writing this piece specifically for The Startup here on Medium because I know that there may be some of you going through a similar thing right now.
And if I can help you — just one of you — to not go down the same route, then I’m happy.
The startup life is one where often more money flows out than in. And in an attempt to set things up in the best way from the beginning, spending money is easy.
But if you can avoid spending on something that later you’ll figure out was never going to work… well that’s what this piece is for!
Test Your Concept and Idea Before Spending Thousands On Custom This or Custom That
Run it by as many people as you can.
And try not to just ask yes-men.
Or just your other startup buddies.
Ideally — ask real human customers! (Or potential customers if you don’t have any yet.)
But whatever you do, don’t go in blind with your fingers crossed and money pouring out of the bank account on pure hope and wishful thinking.
Take the questions a step further
Now, if they really like the idea… ask them if they would pay for it.
And how much they would pay for something like that.
Taking the questions beyond “is it a cool idea? do you like it?” to the pointy end and real questions like “will you buy this? and for how much” will help even more.
Something might be a cool idea — and customers could agree — but are they willing to pay for it?
Now that, my friends, is the real question.
Learn from other people’s mistakes wherever possible.
Test your theories. Put the idea through its paces.
The more you’re about to spend, the more testing of your idea you should do.
And whatever you do, don’t spend thousands or tens of thousands before knowing that customers want it and would pay for it.
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