From the Rooftop

Hands-On Learning

bttirrell — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:03:08 +0000

Since I discovered that there is a likely market for my product (more specifics once the online store officially launches), I spent the past 2 months building prototypes by hand. It has been a tedious but enlightening step in the product development process. I am confident that it was time well-spent, as I could test many variables rather rapidly while spending minimal money (albeit a great deal of my own time). Additionally, interacting with my product in such an intimate fashion allowed me to develop and test solutions to problems I encountered.

I am relatively confident in the designs I’ve settled on (though I wouldn’t say the prototyping process is over). At this point, I’m having some prototypes made by a manufacturer, which I hope will help me further refine and standardize the product. Fingers crossed, everything will turn out as planned and I can move to full-scale production and marketing.

Battle: Winning. War: TBD

bttirrell — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:06:18 +0000

I’ve been quite busy since last time, testing three new product ideas without committing to any of them before they were proven. Two bombed, but one of them has been successful enough that I’m moving into the next stage. I built a more robust Adwords campaign to test multiple variables and teach myself how to use this resource more effectively. Along the way, I found a few articles online (especially this one) that were particularly helpful, in addition to the guides within Google.

Here’s what I did to move into the second stage of Adwords testing:

1. I categorized keywords and split them into groups. For example, since I am working on an apparel product, I have a group for the material, one for the method of manufacture, one for the unique design, etc. I also made a group called “general” for all keywords that don’t fit into one of the other categories.

2. I created a unique ad for each group. This way, I could try to tailor each ad to the user’s search.

I saw some improvement in my statistics after implementing these changes, but it still wasn’t ideal. After a few days, I did the following:

3. I added more keywords in each category. Specifically, I added exact match versions of most of my existing keywords.

4. I created more ads in my top three categories and set the campaign to serve all ads equally to test the different copy. This was the most fun part, because I could be creative and try lots of different combinations in hopes of hitting a winner.

After making these last two improvements, I did see some interesting trends, most notably in the different ads. I only have a few days worth of data right now, so I can’t say anything definitive, but one of my ads is showing a clickthrough rate over 2%. I can probably improve this further by weeding out all of the underperforming keywords, but I’m not ready to count anything out just yet.

Overall, I’m relatively pleased considering that my landing page design is mediocre at best (I don’t actually have a product to sell yet) and I’m very new to Adwords. Still, I need to continue improving my stats and lower my costs. I think I’ll see some positive changes when I remove the bad keywords and again when I flesh out the landing page. I’ll also try some different ad copy to see if I can beat my current numbers.

This is just starting to get exciting. Hopefully I’ll have a prototype to show soon.

One Chicken, Two Chicken, Three Chickens

bttirrell — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:20:24 +0000

It was a classic case of counting chickens before they’d hatched, or more appropriately, investing time into ideas before I’d proven them worthwhile.

I spent hours and hours designing landing pages for a potential product, even going so far as to create a drawing of the product to display as a picture on the sites. At one point I had uploaded six different sites, each with a different company name to test response. I even got an iContact account and assigned each one a separate email address so that potential customers could submit their email to receive product updates. I then set up an AdWords campaign with six different ads to drive traffic to the sites. I ran the test for one week, then simplified it and ran it for another full week. After all of that work, I got one click. Yes, 212 impressions, 2 weeks, and a single click. That’s a lot of work for one data point.

So while I’m kicking myself for all the lost time, it’s not all bad. First of all, creating those webpages taught me a lot about html that I can use down the road. Starting up my iContact account let me play around with creating email marketing campaigns (and the first month is free, so I didn’t spend anything during the steepest part of the learning curve). I also got some AdWords experience, and most importantly, learned to minimize investment into unproven ideas.

From here on out, I’m going to test the viability of product ideas in a much less cumbersome way. A single ad campaign and a two sentence landing page to start. Anything that generates decent response will be advanced to the next round of testing. My hope is that I will be able to test more ideas more quickly this way, focusing my time on the winners and pruning away the losers. Stay tuned to see how it goes.

Product Testing Resources

bttirrell — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:18:35 +0000

Since my last post, I read two very interesting articles on product testing. The first is on page 104 of the October issue of Inc. Magazine (I couldn’t find it on their website). It deals with lean product development and minimum viable product. The second is a post by Ramit Sethi on his blog, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and focuses specifically on beta testing.

Both of these articles deal with the issues I’m facing right now with my own test. Even if my current product idea doesn’t work, these are all strategies that I can apply to future products.

Adult Education

bttirrell — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:49:02 +0000

I’ve been trying to teach myself a lot of new things these past few weeks, including online advertising and email list management. I started working with Google AdWords to test out some product ideas I had. The good news is that now that I’ve gotten the hang of it, I think I can set up new campaigns quite easily. The bad news, however, is that I’m not getting the kind of response I wanted from my ads. That is, I’m not getting any response at all.

I suppose it’s good to know in the early stages that no one is interested in the product I’m proposing, but it is a little disheartening to think about going back to the drawing board. I’m going to try the advertising test for another week with a higher bid to see if that changes anything. Has anyone had a similar experience with AdWords? What worked for you?

Housewarming Party!

bttirrell — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:56:45 +0000

I just moved the blog to its new, hopefully permanent domain, fromtherooftop.com. I’m using the old domain, brandontirrell.com, to host some marketing test pages. Once my tests are over, I may just use it for a short bio or some other marketing purpose.

I was quite surprised by how easy the move was, considering that I barely understand how hosting works or how to use my ftp client. I’m determined to learn skills like this, though, so I checked out this guide. I made a few mistakes in the beginning, but once I familiarized myself with the file structure, it went very smoothly.

Have you moved a Wordpress blog before? Share your experiences in the comments.

Top-Down Entrepreneurship?

bttirrell — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 03:01:54 +0000

I’ve known that I wanted to start a business for years now, but I had trouble figuring out what was driving me. I constantly jumped between ideas and couldn’t really settle on something that seemed right. After spending some time this summer with other hopeful business owners, I realized that most of them intended to start businesses based on their experience as an employee. In other words, if they worked for Pepsi, they wanted to start their own drink company, or if they worked for IKEA, they wanted to open their own furniture showroom.

This is what I would call bottom-up entrepreneurship. That is, starting with the skills and experience of an employee and building up into the role of CEO. This reminds me of the classic story of a company president who started out in the mailroom and rose through the ranks over a lifetime, learning to do every job along the way. While this certainly has some appeal, I don’t think I am that type of entrepreneur. I don’t mean any disrespect to the bottom-up crowd, either. On the contrary, I’m jealous of the technical skills they can apply to their ventures and their ability to think, “Well, I’m a glassblower, and I like it, so I’ll start an ornamental glass company.” Sadly, that’s just not me right now.

By now you must be thinking that if I’m calling myself a top-down entrepreneur, I must have some business experience or at least studied it in school. However, neither of those assumptions would be true. In fact, I’m a clean slate, a vacuum, but I couldn’t very well refer to myself as a “black-hole” entrepreneur. That doesn’t inspire financial confidence. Rather, I decided on “top-down” not because I have experience at the top, but because I’m going to start there anyway.

You see, I want to start and own a company because it means that I get to make the decisions. I can design the company’s policies to fit my ideas and beliefs. In effect, I want a business that is an extension of me, that embodies what I want as a consumer. Now that I read it, it does sound a bit narcissistic, but I’m not going to deny that’s what’s driving me. It’s all about not being constrained by the skills I lack and knowing that I can learn or delegate the necessary ones. People learn best by doing, and at the top, I can have a hand in everything.

Time to get Serious

bttirrell — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 02:34:44 +0000

"He won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it'll just work itself out naturally."

I’m officially unemployed, that is, I am no longer receiving a paycheck. I suppose the more optimistic view is that I’ve just become self-employed for the first time in my life. Hooray! Now that we have the happiness out of the way, let’s take a closer look at the other side of the coin: fear. I can subsist for awhile on my savings, but if I’m not producing an independent income for myself by the time that runs out, I’ll have to open resume.doc and try to find creative ways to put a positive spin on my failed foray into entrepreneurship. To make matters worse, I’ll be broke and wondering why I didn’t just get another job immediately and spend my savings on a nice car. There it is, the worst case scenario. Not really that bad in the big picture.

I have some plans to start producing that income, but I’ll save that for later. Let’s talk about this blog for a minute. There are plenty of business experts out there giving advice (much of it useful, some not), but I am not one of those. Eventually, I may be qualified to give out advice, but everyone starts somewhere. This blog is all about the start, and all of the trial-and-error, learn-as-you-go details. Hopefully I’ll build something successful, though the harsh reality is that I’m statistically more likely to fail. Everybody likes a good underdog story, right?