I’m quitting my day job as of March 31st. Today I was running out to lunch prior to a day packed with various uISV-centered activities and it struck me: crikey, this is really happening. I’m exhilarated and that weird not-scared-not-settled feeling one gets when one has run out the door in a hurry and is absolutely positive they have left something behind despite having verified the presence of cellphone, wallet, and day job ID card. (Oh, to no longer need the day job ID card.)
Let’s see, what is new and exciting:
Mini-sites: I met a new designer over the Internet who is helping me out with my stable of mini-sites, such as the (previously created) Easter bingo cards that I’m sure are going to be very popular over the next two weeks.
A/B tests: I have six A/B tests currently ongoing, which I think is my personal record for simultaneous A/B tests.
1) Landing page: Text heavy versus an image, a few sentences, and a signup button.
2) Shopping cart: A tweak of some microcopy (“Thank you for your interest in Bingo Card Creator!” -> “Get instant access to Bingo Card Creator!”)
3) Shopping cart: Addition of microcopy (“You don’t need an account to pay with your credit card though Paypal.”)
4) Online version dashboard: Addition of one-click access to top 10 word lists. Seems to be a crashing failure at increasing task completion, incidentally. I’ll be reverting this one in a moment.
5) Guest signup: Presence/absence of guest signup seems to have no effect whatsoever on sales. Good — I’m going to probably disable it, as they cost me support issues through the wazoo.
6) Button redesign. I found another talented designer recently, and decided to get a few dozen buttons drawn up to start testing versus my existing ones.
The old buttons:
The new buttons:
After seeing whether those new buttons are roughly comparable to the old ones or not, I had the designer make many, many variations on color and button texts. As always, I’m testing my way to victory, one 3~5% lift at a time.
Next Application: I have more or less mentally committed myself to my next application, although I should probably give it some more thought. Hint: it uses Twilio. Stay tuned to the same blog time, same blog channel for when I have something to announce.
Substantive Blog Posts: I’m working on a few long-form posts about what it is/was like running a business in my side time and how to do that without losing your sanity. If there are particular aspects of that you’d like to hear about, I’d love to hear them. Folks keep telling me to focus on time management techniques, so I guess I’ll be covering that, but I think they’re a little dry.
Congrats Patrick! Best of luck with your new full-time venture.
Looking forward to your retrospective posts about doing Bingo Card Creator on the side.
In the mean time, I think A/B test #3 would be better worded as “You don’t need a Paypal account to pay with your credit card.”. Current version makes it sound, to me at least, like you don’t need a BCC account to pay with CC through Paypal.
Patrick:
March 31st is also my last day at the big corporate job. After nine years of being dismayed at how little we get done, I’m going back to the start-up life. If you simply define the term uISV by the number of employees then I guess the new business fits, but it couldn’t be more different from yours. B2B sales of large systems in a tough industry where our collective 60+ years of contacts and domain expertise are the only reason this could possibly work.
But enough about me … first I want to offer a big congratulations! I’ve been very impressed with how you’ve used processes to multiply your time. A man after my own “E-Myth” heart! Having built several multi-million dollar start-ups, I can tell you that you would make a great CEO of a small company. The needs are the same – only the scale changes (though many people don’t recognize this, go get funding, try to do something that’s too big for them and fail).
So, in an effort to celebrate your upcoming milestone and as a big thank you for the work you’ve put into this blog and the other successes you’ve inspired, I’d like to offer you a present. There is truth to the adage that it’s easier to sell a second product to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one. And you’ve got a huge set of word lists and a base of customers in the education market. So I’d like to offer you a block of code that packs those word lists into a word search using the smallest block of letters possible. It’s in Python, so converting it to Ruby should be trivial. The only missing part is the creation of an answer key.
E-mail me if you’re interested and once again … a big congratulations!
That last comment has some excellent advice that, if you don’t consider it, will have me hopping on a plane to beat some advice into you. :)
Hopped over here to mention that time management is, for me, the biggest obstacle to mISVhood. I don’t know if I’m representative of your readers (I’m probably representative for my demographic), but I sure would appreciate as much advice as you’re willing to impart on that subject.
New buttons are looking MUCH better.
Have you thought of dropping the “Quick Links” header? It looks like it’s just taking up space.
Congratulations! I’ve been following your blog for a little over year and the content has been a great inspiration. Best of luck.
Also, the new buttons look good and I agree with nnc’s suggestion on the microcopy, that seems much clearer.