Results from my 1st Lean Startup Experiment || BodyVice.com

Hello there, my name is Christian Dalzell and I recently completed my first Lean Startup experiment for my eCommerce company, BodyVice. I completed this experiment on my own and here is the link to my original hypothesis on Trello: https://trello.com/c/3zI3Vv4L/147-christian-dalzell-is-my-name-twitter-handle-is-christiandalz-i-saw-this-on-medium.

I am part of an experimental incubator that gives startups and entrepreneurs funding in exchange for testing and sharing leanstartup hypotheses

Hypothesis

I hypothesized that I could get 5 fitness professionals to agree via email (or message) to be Beta testers on my platform and therefore become first adopters. Beta testing involves creating a seller profile and sharing with their new profile to their audience through social media.

This is what happened… Out of the 50 people, 8 have agreed to become Beta testers to date. Success!

Methodology

I prequalified these fitness professionals by searching fitness related hashtags and then cherry-picking users who’s posts achieved more than 100 likes (roughly). Sometimes much greater than 100 depending on the volume of postings under the specific hashtag.

I then took a look at these peoples Bio’s and if I concluded that they would be a candidate for my solution. Then I tried to make contact.

I was confident that 5 fitness professionals would agree to help me but I underestimated how many people I would need to contact to get the 5 people onboard.

In total I contacted 50 fitness professionals using Instagram’s Direct Message Feature or the persons eMail if posted in their Instagram Bio.

Results & Conclusions

Out of the 50 people, 8 have agreed to become Beta testers to date. Success!

The majority of the fitness professionals I reached out to I sourced via Instagram’s explore feature and I did not have any previous knowledge/contact of them nor did they of me. The total number of these people is 46 out of 50.

Before starting my experiment I had already reached out to some friends who I know work in the fitness industry on the admin side, mainly gym management for example. From this I received 7 leads, 4 of which met the same criteria that I mentioned above.

The most surprising thing that I learnt was that all 4 people who I contacted and was able to mention the name of a mutual friend/contact agreed to help me and become Beta testers.

Out of the 100% cold contacts that I approached, my success rate was slightly under 9%. Not bad but I thought it would be higher so this proved me wrong. Pity I didn’t mention it in my hypothesis!

One thing to note with these findings is that even though my experiment showed a 100% success rate for warm leads, I do not believe this will hold true if the sample size was increased but I still believe it would be much higher that cold leads.

Looking Back and also Forward

In hindsight I think that my hypothesis could have been written to include a more definitive test group. What I mean by this is that I could have kept testing until I had 5 people onboard and then labeled the experiment a success, which it still might be but if I had limited myself to a definite number of attempts then I would get a clearer measurement of how effective my method was. Although I did not include it in my written Hypothesis, I did limit the experiment to 50 interviews. This proved to be enough thankfully.

On second thought, it is also a valuable practice to keep going until you achieve your goal and then look back and discover exactly what it took to achieve your goal.

Another valuable discovery was made from this experiment in regards to contact methods, specifically the effectiveness of Instagram Direct Messages and eMail.

When I began the experiement, after the first 10 people I contacted I had my suspicions that eMail was going to be the more effective medium as the people who took the time to post their eMail address did so for contact purposes. This ofcourse is propably still true but in my experience, eMail responses were equal to responses I received form Instagram DMs. The direct messages have their down falls which include the following:

· Instagram Bots use them to Spam

· Some people are not notified due to settings

· Some people completely ignore DMs from unknown people

Bonus Learning

That sums up my experiment, my results but not my learnings just yet. Following experiment completion, I had the opportunity to meet with Adam Weinberg to discuss my 100 interview progress, this experiment, write up and some future direction which I need!

I met Adam in NYC and had the pleasure of watching some of his AV mastery while working at a rock show for a band called Panzie. I had never heard of them before but they put on one hell of a show so if you get the chance you should check them out!

Apart from making me aware that the perceived Berenstein Bears is actually spelt BerenstAin Bears (A little bit lost on me as I am not from the US) but basically the lesson is that people will often swear blind that their beliefs are correct and by doing so for long enough in some way or another their beliefs become a reality of sorts. In the case of the Bears, the majority of people will agree is spelt ‘stein’ and therefore in their joint realities it is spelt that way. So how this transpires to us, who are working towards a successful business or idea, is that our own self-belief is paramount in making our efforts a success and the most important factor in many cases.

Another valuable lesson the Adam taught me was that guilt — shoulda — woulda — couldas will keep us in the past while self doubt and doubting in general will prevent us from moving forward to the future so we must live in the now. I believe that this lesson is very important and resonates strongly with many of the teaching of the Lean startup methodologies.

One final piece of knowledge that Adam dropped on me was that the Humans of New York guy, who is probably close to a millionaire from taking pictures and recording stories from strangers, quit his high paying job to pursue his ambition to do his HONY project despite everyone warning and advising against it. So believe in yourself and get the job done and you will succeed. Saying that… I would love to see how his 100 MilValChal interviews would have turned out!!!

Thanks again Adam W.

My next experiment will be based around a workaround method to circumvent development in order to test out the commercial viability to the Beta testers that I have recruited in this experiment. I will get the hypothesis together and posted soon. I am looking forward to pressing on and keeping the momentum while testing another avenue to get me closer to the final product.

I hope this write up has been some help to some of you and please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions or feel like I could lend a hand with what your working on.

Christian Dalzell.