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.