The Lean Start Part 3 - Adventures with Landing Pages

Previously on the Lean Start

Last time, I wrote about the results of the online survey and how they may be biased as I paid for the responders for their time. In order to validate the results for people who weren't being paid, I decided to create a Landing Page.

The Landing Page Genesis

This has proved to be somewhat controversial. On the one hand, it seems that putting up a page with a description of the Problem and the proposed Solution is a simple way to gather feedback. On the other, without any functionality behind it, it seems somehow deceptive to my visitors.

For those of you who have been in the software business for a while, the concept of "vapour-ware" will be all too familiar. Many companies have floundered by over-promising and under-delivering. This is the challenge that I faced with the Landing Page design and copy. I wanted to give a flavour of what the service would do without overwhelming the visitors with too much detail.

In order to help, I solicited feedback from some close friends who were critical enough to tell me that I was putting far too much text on the screen. One described it as like reading a Request For Information tender response. I guess I have been in the B2B space too long! Others were critical of actually releasing something to my potential users that didn't do anything.

Nevertheless, I decided to press on and created a simple site with the help of a Web Designer. You can see the site here: http://bit.ly/g5Jyrn

From One to Many Landing Pages

The next step was to drive some traffic to the page from friends and family. I chose two direct contact methods, email and Facebook messages. In order to distinguish how the traffic was being generated, I created duplicate versions of the site.

The results surprised me a little. Email worked much better than Facebook in driving traffic to the site. There could be several reasons for this, including the fact that not everybody logs onto Facebook every day, but do check their email.

So the landing pages are up and running and visitors are leaving their email contact details for when the service is open. In my next post, I will describe some of the traffic statistics and go into more detail about what worked (and what didn't) in terms of driving traffic to the site.

And if you have the time, here is the link to the landing page again. http://bit.ly/g5Jyrn Drop over and take a look. If you have any comments, I'd be delighted to hear them.

The Lean Start Part 2 - Survey Results

The Results Are In

In my previous post, I wrote about applying the principles of the Lean Startup to the "Problem". I created a survey to see if other people had this Problem too and if they were interested in a solution. You can read more about it here (http://bit.ly/by01DC).

In a poll of 200 users, it turns out that many of them have the same Problem that I do. Furthermore, two thirds of the respondents would use or are likely to use such a solution to this Problem if it was available, with a further ten percent unsure but requesting more information.

This is great news and I have learned it very quickly and cheaply. However, there are some caveats that must be recognized.

1. The group of users are self-selecting. This can introduce bias in a survey, but in an online environment, there is no other way to carry it out. However, for an online service, this will be the way most people will find it.
2. The respondents were inclined to answer in response for a small monetary reward. As a result, the charge may be levelled that they were telling me what I wanted to hear, just to get paid. This one is more difficult to deal with. However, I would imagine that the Amazon Mechanical Turk system would not last long if the responders were constantly doing shoddy work.
3. I may have selected a poor set of questions, or worded them to bias towards the result I wanted.

However, the results are strong enough to proceed with the next iteration of a Minimal Viable Product, a landing page. This iteration will address the issue that there won't be a monetary reward for expressing interest.

In my next post, I'll say a little more about the landing page and the various options I'm using to help potential users discover the service and express interest.

A Little Bit More About The Survey

I split the survey into three parts
Part I - Some basic demographic information
Part II - Description of the Problem
Part III - Description of the Solution

From Part I, I learned the following:

1. The responses were split exactly in two halves, male and female, so were a perfect statistical sample from a gender perspective.
2. Nearly half of the respondents were between 18 and 25 years old, with a further third in the age range 26 to 35.
3. I also asked about use of social networks and a staggering 80% of respondents use Facebook, with Twitter a distant second at 35% (and favoured slightly by men).
4. Nearly half of the respondents do not use their mobile phone for accessing the internet at all. So for an online service, developing a mobile site would still be a secondary concern to a traditional site.

Parts II and III are specific to the Problem and the Solution, so I'll post more information on these aspects later.

As always, I appreciate any comments you may have and would love to hear about your own experiences.  

A Lean Startup Tryout

At a recent warm up event for the Dublin Web Summit, Eric Ries spoke to a large group of people about his experience writing software that never saw the light of day as a completed product. There are various reasons why this has happened, but mainly it comes down to not building something that people actually want.

We are all aware that writing software is a complex and expensive thing to do, so such abandoned projects represent a tremendous waste of time and effort that could be better spent. The software business is littered with failed startups, that built products that nobody wanted, or were not willing to pay enough for to justify the investment.

So he has taken this experience and created a new methodology for evaluating ideas, called the Lean Startup. Central to this methodology is the concept of carefully designing experiments to test each assumption being made in creating new product. In addition, these experiments should be executed quickly and the results evaluated in a series of iterations. This is done by building what's called a Minimal Viable Product at each iteration. Such a product has the minimum amount of features to test a particular aspect of an idea. In this case, the definition of product is quite broad and may or may not involve an actual software product. (For more information on the Lean Startup methodology, check out this slide presentation or have a look at Eric's blog.)

After this talk, I wondered if it was indeed possible to test my ideas in this way. As someone who learned to code as a teenager, my computer is littered with such incomplete projects; fragments of code representing ideas that briefly blossomed, only to wither away when my attention moved on to something else. I always wonder though what would have happened if I actually brought some of these ideas to a reasonable conclusion.

So I decided to try it out and see where it led.

There is one idea in particular that has been bugging me for about a year. I had spent weekends writing code to solve a problem that I have personally, but without really thinking if this was the right thing to do. For the moment, I will call this, the Problem (with a capital 'P').

Applying the Lean Startup principles to this Problem, I created my first Minimal Viable Product - a survey. Before wasting any more time writing code, I needed to find out if other people had this Problem too and if I created a solution, would they use it.

I came across this blog post by Lindsey Harper about testing ideas using a survey managed with Amazon's Mechanical Turk. This is a service where you can pay a small amount of money to people online to complete a simple task. So here was a simple and effective way to get some answers to my questions.

Firstly, I opened up the survey to a small pilot group of 30 to test the wording of the questions. Within two hours, I had my results. Piloting the survey like this was a very useful step, as it turned out that one question in particular was misinterpreted by almost all of the respondents and required redrafting.

Following this, I launched the survey to a much wider group of users and when the results are in, I'll post them, so watch this space.

If you have tried the Lean Startup principles and have any comments on the approach, I'd love to hear them!