Find Your Early Adopters Online for Less Than $250
This simple and affordable experiment can save you money and guesswork by telling you who you should be talking to.
I had the pleasure of working with an entrepreneur that, like many entrepreneurs, had poured her soul into her product.
At the point I’d met her, she’d already built a fully functioning beta product that embodied some of her research as a PhD student at Imperial College London. She’d had many conversations with mentors, investors and potential users, but she was looking for a fresh perspective. She knew her product had multiple potential applications, but she was looking for a more concrete path forward. And she was on a budget.
That’s where our team came in.
The Product
Our entrepreneur has a vision of using artificial intelligence (AI) to augment the creative process. She understands that brainstorming is not only a critical step in the creative process but one that is vulnerable to inefficiency.
Her product, FlowCreate, uses AI and natural language processing (NLP) to generate intelligent keywords, identifies themes between words and creates a digital record for easy sharing.
The Problem
There are a ton of use cases for an intelligent brainstorming tool and even more ways the product can evolve over time. But the issue with trying to solve everyone’s problem is that you often end up solving no one’s. Without a clear understanding of who your first customer is, you can’t possibly articulate a meaningful value proposition or build out a relevant product roadmap.
Our mission was simple: Identify the user group most attracted to this product so we can then build a strategy around them. Our mission was a success, and we spent less than $250 USD.
The Process
1. Mapped out potential use cases
To start, we brainstormed the many potential use cases of the FlowCreate. We asked ourselves, “Who’s job depends on having a steady flow of creative ideas?”.
We also did some quick research on market size and revenue potential. From there we narrowed it down to 2 groups of potential users we wanted to speak with: entrepreneurs and marketers (both in-house and agency).
2. Conducted user interviews
We gathered insights from 5–7 users from each group and found:
- Entrepreneurs do a high volume of brainstorming early on as they build out the foundation of their brand (name, logo, value proposition, etc.). They have lean, more technical teams to start, less marketing experience and little funds upfront.
- Large creative teams are constantly churning out ideas which can lead to creative fatigue. Given the nature of their work, they often have access to a budget for creative tools, especially when they have a heavy client load.
Perhaps one of the most important findings for us was the emergence of a new user group not thought of before: the creative freelancer.
- Creative freelancers are former members of creative teams who have made the leap to start their own business. They now brainstorm alone and miss being able to bounce ideas off other creatives. Their livelihood depends on their success, so they have incentive to invest in creative tools.
3. Designed and executed an experiment
We designed an experiment aimed at the 3 user groups we hypothesized had the greatest need for a product like FlowCreate.
It started with 3 custom Google ad campaigns that called out the value proposition for each group. Each of the ads sent potential users to unique product pages that built more on those value propositions. We used Hotjar to monitor click streams in order to optimize the webpages. Click stream analysis prompted us to create 3 simple videos to convey the product’s benefits in context which led to a bump in trial signups.
When users signed up for the free trial, it triggered a series of onboarding emails that encouraged them get the most out of the product quickly. Initially, we designed a how-to PDF to kick off our onboarding process, but found through a few test cases that users were more likely to activate the trial when we swapped the PDF for a series of short videos.
To end the trial, we sent users a Typeform survey in an attempt to gather a few more insights.
The Results
After about a month of running the experiment, our results showed that the creative freelancer persona was the most likely early adopter.
Freelancers clicked on the Google Ads 40% more than the next most active user group, the entrepreneur. The conversion rate from product page to free trial for the freelance user was 5.8%. According to WordStream, the average conversion rate for a landing page is 2.35%. And finally, of all 3 groups being tracked, freelancers were the only users who followed the trial through to activation (signing into the product). With this new data in hand, we recommended to our entrepreneur that she consider future product development and marketing be skewed toward them.
Unfortunately, very few users filled out our exit survey (this was expected), but those that did respond gave us great ideas for future product features.
Bear in mind that the data didn’t serve to discount the other user groups — for example, we saw a strong showing from creative agencies — but it gave our entrepreneur some baseline metrics to measure future experiments against.
Perhaps the most important metric we were unable to capture (due to technical and time limitations) is which group is most willing to convert to a paying customer. We left this next mission with our entrepreneur.
The Cost
As the title suggests, this experiment costed us less than $250 to run.
Here’s how we did it:
- Wix product pages. We quickly built pages using the entrepreneur’s existing platform and simply hid the pages from the main navigation to control the flow of traffic.
- Hotjar account. Hotjar has a free, limited-feature account option that was perfect for this experiment. I highly recommend connected it to your website, watching how people navigate your webpage is fascinating.
- Typeform account. We used Typeform’s free account option to send out a clean and simple survey.
- Gmail account. We set up a separate, free gmail account so members of our team could manage the trial requests without contaminating the existing business email account.
- Quicktime and iMovie. We created our onboarding videos by chopping up a Quicktime screen recording using iMovie. We also used iMovie to create the 3 short brand videos.
- Google Spreadsheets. We used a detailed spreadsheet to record trial user information for analysis.
- Google Ads. You may have guessed it by now, but the entire cost of the campaign came from our 3 unique ad campaigns. What’s great is that Google often sends promos that help reduce this cost even further.
It’s tempting to target every use case when you’re an early-stage startup, but a small amount of time and money can go a long way to focus your efforts leading to quicker learning and, ultimately, more success.
