Part of what Pollenizer does regularly is to reality check new ideas by just putting them out there. It’s the fastest way to find out if anyone cares and what they think.
I copped some flack on Friday for tweeting out a link to a site called Noble Village. This was one of those tests. If you see the site all it has is a title, basic offer, and an email submission box. Like this:
So what are we doing here? We’re testing a couple of key things pre-product as customer discovery and customer development.
1. Customer acquisition
We see if we can intercept people who could be interested in a product doing what they would normally do. We run Google ads, Facebook ads, linkedin ads that are really targeted and have a simple offer. We also put it out on Twitter – hence me spamming my friends occasionally. If I said it was one of our businesses then it would influence the effectiveness of the test. Given the reaction from my followers (or at least the ones that know me well enough to tell me) Twitter is clearly not a good way to test.
2. Is there strong general interest?
If we put up a generic offer and ask for an email address, it’s our way of gauging that at least some of the taget customers find the proposition appealing. Giving up your email address isn’t as powerful as paying 1c but it is something.
3. Is there a ‘deal’ combination that appeals?
As well as trying generic offerings, we try specific ones to see if we can find a combination that works. i.e. we might try to focus the page on one of three key points of value to see which one appeals the most. Or we might try three different price types ($100 for the year, $20 a month, free trial, etc).
There is a lot of reasons why a test of this may not show a true result, but it’s one of the fastest ways for us to start learning – and speed of learning is everything.
All 3 of these points are trying to find out if anyone other than you cares. Do even a few possible customers want this, before you go off and start building a product.
As the shirt says…….
P.S. If anyone would like to design some shirts like this for the Australian startup scene I would totally help out and fund it.
The sooner the ‘value prop + email harvestor = MVP’ meme is discredited the better. You were surprised you got a bad reaction?
this may be a way to accumulate some email addresses in preparation for the actual services launch but i don’t believe it is an accurate measure of a sites potential or possible interest level by visitors. my reaction to these efforts is that the business is still in its very early stages so i don’t like to enter my email address due to it all being unknown to me. i want to see what the business is all about, what it has to offer me and how i can benefit, only then do i enter my email address.
but this is just my opinion.