by Justin Wilcox -

Getting Launch Press for your Startup

How we got a dozen launch-day write ups with a little JavaScript, Mechanical Turk, and the Google News API. Code included.

Warning: you only launch once. I don’t recommend generating press until you’ve validated your customer segment(s), their pain(s), and much of your solution. Here’s why:

That said, lets hack some press…

Mechanical Turk Google News Press Hack flow chart

Getting press is daunting for just about every founder. Who do you talk to? How do you find them? What do you pitch them? All questions I spend hours thinking about…for…every…project.

But with a little creativity, and a little hacking, getting press is easier than I thought. Easy enough to get a recent product covered by…

mashforbeswired TNW Venturebeat3logo-geekwire-finalgigaom-logo2

Background

Some friends and I were launching ThingsWeStart, a “Crowdfunding Aggregator” – imagine all of the projects on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, etc. displayed on a map, so you could support projects near you.

Something this badass deserved a press push…

Step #1 – Find the Right Reporters

The first step was to find reporters who might cover us. That started with a Google News search for “Kickstarter”.

Hypothesis: reporters who have already written about Kickstater, or a Kickstarter project, are more likely to write about a map of Kickstarter projects.

This is a very different approach than listing all possible news outlets and submitting tips to them. Instead I was personally targeting individual reporters, who already demonstrated interest in our subject matter.

Want to follow along? Search Google News for articles related to your company’s value proposition.

Step #2 – Download their Articles

Now I had some articles, but what I really needed was the reporters’ contact info. Instead of searching through each story on my own, which would take forever, I wanted to created a spreadsheet of them so I could farm out the work.

Luckily, Google News has an API which makes that relatively easy – but there’s no sense in you reinventing the wheel. Please, use my code:

Google News Downloader Getting MVP Press Hack
Click the pic, use the tool, and you’re halfway there!
Following along? Use this page to download a spreadsheet of articles by reporters you want to contact.

Step #3 – Collect their Contact Info

With the list of articles in hand, I wanted to collect the names and email addresses of each reporter – so I could personally tell them about our launch.

Thing is, I didn’t want to do that work myself – it’s boring. Instead, I asked the good folks on Mechanical Turk (mTurk) to do it for me…for $.03 per email address! If you’re not familiar with mTurk, I can’t recommend it enough.

To get started, I created a HIT template:

mechanical turk template

Then I uploaded a CSV (the spreadsheet you downloaded in Step #2) to mTurk:

…and mTurk automatically combined the two to create a HIT for each article in the CSV:

mechanical turk template preview

Rather than investing two weeks digging for contact info for 700 articles, dozens of people delivered me results within a couple days.

I also recommend including tips for finding author’s emails addresses in your HITs. Example

Important: I suggest you turn off requiring Master Turkers. You’ll have to babysit the results, and block Turkers who aren’t giving you valid results, but you’ll likely find more people willing to help.

Following along? Create a new HIT on mTurk and use this HTML as the basis for your template.

Step #4 – Progress Monitoring

When I did this, I saw a large number of HITs completed within the first few days. After that, results started to drop off.  I think my HITs eventually got pushed to the bottom of the stack.

Pssst: If you need a hand, I’m happy to help.

To counter that, every couple days I would cancel my incomplete HITs, and relaunch any articles I didn’t have contact information for.

Within a week, I had contact information for 350 reporters who had written articles about Kickstarter.

Step #5 – Build a Press Kit

The most important rule I’ve found when working with reporters is:

The more you help reporters, the more they’ll help you. tweet-this-button

These poor folks are under crazy deadlines, have to produce multiple stories per day, and are inundated with requests for coverage.  The more we can help them out by writing our story for them, the better off we’ll both be. Win-win.

Here’s the press kit we prepared for our launch.  It includes:

  • Description of the problem we solve
  • Screenshots
  • Beautiful Infographics by Stephanie Haller (be sure to include some kind of image)
  • Bio of the team
  • Why we’re doing this
  • Why we’re different than existing solutions

Step #6 – Prime the Pump

With contact information in hand, and a killer press kit, it was time to reach out to the reporters. 5 days before launch, I gave them a heads up we were coming, but no access to our press kit:

A couple days later, I gave them access to our full press kit, but told them not to write about us until launch day:

On launch day, I told them to have at it:

Example: Launch day emai

Important: embargoes are essential. 

It’s important to tell reporters that your content is “embargoed” until you officially launch, which means they’re not allowed to write about you until your launch date.  If you don’t mention this, one of these folks is going to jump the gun and publish your story early. That in turn, will make other reporters less interested in covering you, since it’ll be old news by then.

We didn’t include an embargo, but we should have…

Some news outlets/reporters hate embargoes. If you really want their press, only tell them about your launch the day before you go live.

Step #7 – Watch the Ink Roll In!

Once we launched we simply setup some Google Alerts and Twitter searches, and watched the press roll in.

Hack Metrics

  • Hours spent: 40 (includes time coming up with the hack, writing the code, etc. Should take you less.)
  • Money spent: 350 email addresses x $0.03/address = $10.50
  • PR pros hired: 0
  • Total write-ups: 13
  • Traffic generated: ??? Remember when GoDaddy’s DNS service went down? That was the day we launched :)

Following along? I’d love to hear if you’ve tried this, or other press hacks!

Final Tips:

  • Play around with pricing. If you’re in a hurry, you’ll probably want to pay more than $.03/article
  • Block turkers who submit obviously fraudulent contact info (you won’t have to pay for those)
  • I’m stoked, quite a few people are finding this article useful! Unfortunately, that means there probably lots of HITs on MTurk right now trying to get contact info for journalists. That means, you may need to either pay more, or wait a little while before trying it yourself.

TL; DR

The Google News API and Mechanical Turk can be combined to get lots of press for your launch.

The hackers’s guide to getting press What's comes after interviewing customers? A Post It cloud to sort the signal from the noise.

What’s Next?

Want help getting press? Schedule a 1-on-1 mentoring call.

Subscribe via Email or RSS for more hacks and in-depth discussions on getting press, validating marketing channels, and reaching your customers.

First time to Customer Development Labs?

Check out our most popular experiments:

  1. Interviewing 100 customers in 4 hours with MTurk
  2. You’ve interviewed customers. Now what?
  3. Lean Recruiting: Testing a 2-sided market

Customer Development Made Easy…

by Justin Wilcox -

Lean Recruiting: Testing a 2-Sided Market

This post is brought to you in part by this week’s Startup Edition question: How do you get a job in startups?

recruiting 2 sided market lean startup customer development

I am Not a Recruiter

I was playing ping pong with a friend recently when he tried to distract himself from the beating he was receiving…

Friend: I need to hire 15 people this quarter. Do you want to help?
Me: Of course not…I’m a dev, not a recruiter. Don’t be rude just because you’re losing.* 17 serving 3.

* Engineers typically despise recruiters. 

But he got me thinking – companies are so hard up for senior dev talent, they’re paying recruiters an extra 20% – 25% of a new employee’s 1st year’s salary (e.g. for a $100k/year hire, they’re shelling out an extra $20k to $25k to the recruiter who found her).

Note: Non-tech roles are easier to fill – typically by friends-of-friends. Looking for a startup job but don’t have the right friends? Get some.

Curiosity piqued, I wondered…what would it take to solve this problem? And how would I test it?

Except when I’m Testing

Recruiting is a classic 2-sided market. You’ve got candidates and employers – neither of which will talk to you if you don’t have buy-in from the other (e.g. Craigslist is useless w/o buyers and sellers, Groupon is useless w/o companies and consumers, etc.)

When I mentor startups in 2-sided markets, the question is always, “Which side do I test first?” To which I answer, “The harder one.”

In this case, finding great developers is harder than finding people who want to hire them, so…

Hypothesis: I can find great startup devs traditional recruiters can’t.

Of course, that begs the question, “How do you test one side of the market, without the other on board?” In other words, how can I get great candidates (e.g. amazing devs who currently have jobs) to talk with me, if I’m not working with great companies they want to work for? The answer…

Forecasting

To crack the chicken & egg problem of 2-sided markets, we’re going to “forecast” to one side of the market that the other side is on board. Let me be clear, I make a big distinction between Forecasting, Predicting and outright Lying:

Forecasting = Statements made with > 90% certainty
Predicting = Statements made with < 90% certainty
Lying = Statements made with < 50% certainty

You can see what I mean with a screenshot from my MVP:

Predicting would have been including logos of friends’ companies on this page, without talking to them first. It’s likely they would have been on board, but since I wasn’t > 90% sure, I didn’t include them.

Lying would have been including logos of companies I had no relationships with.

The flier above is an example of forecasting. I haven’t nailed down everything 100%, but if the candidates come, I’m > 90% sure I can deliver what’s written.

Note: this is a lesson I learned the hard way! If you want to see what happens when you “lie” instead of “forecast”, take a look at this. Please, learn from my mistakes :)

MVP Time

Using Unbounce, I whipped up an MVP and posted it on Hacker News. 8 hours later, I had 200+ candidates:

conversion rates for lean recruiting case study 2 sided market

Next I spent 3 weeks researching and interviewing each of the candidates to confirm these folks were high quality. Sounds tedious but I had a couple tricks up my sleeve:

  • I used to be a hiring manager for a large software company – that made screening faster.
  • It’s actually fun. Nothing better than 1-on-1 conversations with smart people who I can help take the next step on their path. It’s proving to be a privilege.

Within a month, I had validated problem market fit for the “hard” side of my 2-sided market.

Validating the “Less Hard” Side

Once I knew I had solid candidates, it was time to validate I had opportunities to place them in. Of course I had friends who were hiring, but I wanted to see if there was a more scalable way to make connections:

recruiting 2 sided marketplace customer development lean startup

Since my customers are my friends, Facebook did the trick and got me 4 intros to recruiters – 3 of which wanted to collaborate (i.e. I would source candidates, they would source open positions, and we’d share referral fees).

Note: when 3 out of 4 customers are willing to give you money, despite the fact you have no clue what you’re doing, you’re solving a hair-on-fire problem.

As a meta-cruiter(?) I now have access to a couple dozen open positions.

Problem Market Fit isn’t Product Market Fit

At this point, I’ve validated Problem Market Fit for both sides of the market, but it remains to be seen whether or not I’ll successfully place folks. If I can do that with consistency, we’ll know we’ll have achieved Product Market Fit as well.

Want to know how this story ends? So do I. I’ll share the results as soon as they’re in. Subscribe via Email or RSS to get them, plus I’m really excited about our next post – Hacking the Google News API & Mechanical Turk to get press!

TL; DR

3 Steps to Testing a 2-sided market:

  1. Define the “hard” side (e.g. candidates) and the “less hard” side (e.g. employers)
  2. Validate buy-in from the “hard” side by forecasting buy-in from the “less hard” side
  3. Use validation from the “hard side” to validate the “less hard” side

Step 4. Profit.

Psst: If you want a startup job, and you code, I’m now happy to help :). All others check out the excellent advice in this week’s Startup Edition!

First time to Customer Development Labs?

Check out our most popular experiments:

  1. Interviewing 100 customers in 4 hours with MTurk
  2. Testing your Domain Name
  3. Crowdtesting: How many $’s is your idea worth?

If you liked this – subscribe for more Customer Development tips, tricks & experiments (Email or RSS).

by Justin Wilcox -

You’ve Interviewed Customers. Now what?

One of the challenges of interviewing customers, is analyzing the results. I’m typically left with a pile of terse notes, and a handful of questions:
  • What were the most common pains?
  • If my assumption was invalidated, what do I do next?
  • Were there any major themes that I missed?

My solution? Post-It Notes. Video walk-through below.

Example

The Lean Startup Conference recently asked me to run a workshop on the Science of Pricing. As I started to write the workshop’s description I realized I knew what I wanted to teach, but had no clue what entrepreneurs wanted to learn.

So I got out of the building and I interviewed a handful of founders about the difficulties they had pricing their products.

Here’s how I use Post Its to organize the mess of interview results:

Step 1: Find the Nuggets

Customer Interview Notes

The first thing I do is go through my notes and bold the salient points.

Step 2: Create One Post It per Nugget

Then I wrote up an (online) Post It note for each of the nuggets in one of my interviews.

Then I write up an (online) Post It note for each of the nuggets in one of my interviews.

Step 3: Repeat, with a Different Color

2013-08-15_1200

Then I repeat the process for another interview using different colored Post Its (you’ll see why later).  This is why I use electronic Post Its – I don’t have enough real-life Post It note colors.

Step 4: Group Notes as you Go

2013-08-15_1954

As I create the Post Its, I group common themes together.

Step 5: Keep Only Groups of Post Its

2013-08-15_2010

Once I’m finished creating the Post Its, I usually have quite a mess. To clean that up, I get rid of any Post It that was only mentioned by one customer and keep everything that was mentioned twice+.

Step 6: Sort by Popularity

2013-08-15_2010_001

Next I prioritize the groups of Post Its based on how many customers mentioned those concepts. This is where the different colored Post Its come in handy.

Step 7: Harvest your Learnings

summary

Finally, I create a summary with the core concepts and screen shots of the Post Its. Now I have an easy to read report of the findings, in order of importance, complete with real customer quotes!

This is the shit. If you create one of these, whenever you have a question about what problem you’re solving, “features” you should add to solve it, order to do things in, etc., you can turn to this report and instantly recall your customer’s needs. Bonus: you can easily share it with team members, advisers and potential investors.

For me, all that was left, was to combine what I learned into a description.

What’s Next?

Want help understanding your interviews? Schedule a 1-on-1 mentoring call.

This is Part 5 of our series of on Interviewing Customers:

  1. Which Customers Should you Interview (The SPA Treatment)
  2. How to Find Customers to Interview
  3. Getting Customer Interviews with Cold Emails
  4. How I Interview Customers
  5. You’ve Interviewed Customers. Now what?

Customer Development Made Easy…

by Justin Wilcox -

How to (Scientifically) Pick the Best Domain Name

tl;dr

Using clever survey questions to quickly test the memorability, spellability and emotional response of potential domain names. Glad we did – almost picked a lousy one.

Problem: Domain Squatters

I’ve found what should be the joyous process of naming a company, quickly devolves into in argument over which of the abysmal choices of available domain names suck the least.

Some friends and I who were building a crowdfunding aggregator wanted to avoid all that, so we came up with a way to test our company/domain names with customer data. Here’s how…

Step 1: Crowdsource Ideas

SquadHelp is 99Designs for domain names. tweet-this-button That means you pay a couple bucks and SquadHelp users will find you some 500+ domain names, all of which are currently available. And if you don’t like any of them, you don’t pay anything.

Note: 99% of the suggestions are going to bad, but I always find that are good ones are worth the money, and they provide inspiration to come up with my own names.

Looking over the list of possible names for our crowdfunding aggregator, we chose our top 3:

  1. altFunder.com
  2. ChangeFunding.com
  3. ThingsWeStart.com

altFunder.com was our favorite name going in to the experiment, the next step of which was deciding…

Step 2: What to Measure?

After reading up on what makes for a good company name, we decided to measure the following characteristics of each name:

  1. Memorability – If users can’t remember your name, they can’t tell their friends about it. tweet-this-button
  2. Spellability & Hearability – If users can’t spell your domain, they could become someone else’s. tweet-this-button
  3. Associations
    1. Emotional associations – what feelings do these names evoke? For more on why this is important see Selling the Why
    2. Image associations – Names people automatically associate images with are more memorable.
    3. Competitor associations – The internet told us you want to avoid a name that gives your competition more clout. Seemed like reasonable advice.

Next up…

Step 3: Design the Experiment

Here’s a video tour of the survey we designed (i.e. why you’re reading this post):

If you don’t want to watch the video, here are the key questions we asked:

To test hear/spellability (try it):

1. Play this audio clip only once and type in the name of the website you hear:

What website did you hear? [input box goes here]

To test memorability:

After speaking & showing the domain names, we’d ask them a bunch of “busy work” questions (e.g. demographic questions, trivial math questions, etc.) to help them forgot the less memorable names:

12. What is the 9th word of the 1st paragraph on this page?

  • eat
  • faster
  • rubber
  • printing

With their minds distracted for a bit, we’d then ask:

Testing domain name memorability
Testing domain name memorability

To test Associations:

For each of the associations (e.g. emotional, image, and competitor) we asked them simple questions like:

  • What images come to mind when you hear this time?
  • How do you feel when you hear this name?
  • What organizations come to mind when you hear this name?

Btw, we used nsurvey for this – an open source survey tool that gave us the power & flexibility we needed. With the survey designed, it was time to…

Step 4: Run the Experiment

Pssst: If you like this blog post so far, you should subscribe (email or RSS)! The next one will be an in-depth look at Steve Blank’s new collaboration with Startup Weekend.

The site was B2C, so we decided to throw our survey up on Mechanical Turk.  We paid $0.10 for each respondent and we stopped after we got 50 (all told $5).

Mechanical Turk (mTurk) domain name survey HIT
mTurk naming survey HIT with bonus fraud detection

Fraud Detection: we had quality assurance questions built into the survey (e.g. what’s the 9th word in the second paragraph, what’s 16 + 32, etc.) to detect cheaters. We gave cheaters a different password than people who took the time to fill out the survey thoroughly.

Step 5: Evaluating the Results

Once the survey results were in, I threw them in a spreadsheet and scored each of the questions like so:

Hearability/Spellability: +2 points for a name each time it was spelled properly

Here are the Hear/Spellability results for our names:

Domain name hearability/spellability results
Domain name hearability/spellability results

Memorability: +2 points each time the name was properly recalled

Domain name memorability results
Domain name memorability results

Image associations: scored subjectively by me (actual responses below)

Positive (+1 point): “people protesting”, “trees, plants, soil, nature”, “tattooed girls and rock music”
Neutral (0 points): “people”, “money”, “change”, “coins”
Negative (-1 point):  “a steaming pile”, “a payday loan center”, “my cluttered basement”

Domain name image association results
Domain name image association results

Feeling associations:

Positive (+1 point): “curious”, “hopeful”, “interested to know what people are starting”
Neutral (0 points): “nothing”, “innovation, kind of a cheesy name”, “mildly inspired”
Negative (-1 point): “annoyed”, “confusion, boredom”, “lame”

Domain name feeling association results
Domain name feeling association results

Competitor associations:

Positive (+1 point): “none”, “no particular companies come to mind”
Neutral (0 points): “charity”, “Kickstarter”, “red cross”
Negative (-1 point): “republican websites”, “Obama campaign”, “payday loans”

Domain name existing websites association results
Domain name existing websites association results

Then we weighted the score of people who we thought were most like our targeted users (e.g. responses from Facebook and Kickstarter users got bumps) and added them all up:

Domain name final weighted results
Domain name final weighted results

View/download the complete spreadsheet here: http://sdrv.ms/Z9941S

Conclusion

We were wrong!  We were leaning towards altFunder.com because it was short & edgy (and thus we assumed more memorable).

Turns out, ThingsWeStart.com was not only more memorable, it was also easier to hear/spell and it had much more positive associations.

For a couple bucks and a couple hours, we saved ourselves thousands of $’s by not picking the crappy name and having to change it later, or trying to buy one from a squatter.

Takeaway:

Don’t waste time debating product names…test them. tweet-this-button

Tips & Tricks

– Before you post a survey about your domain names, be sure to purchase them all. Don’t want one of your clever respondents to snipe them from you.

– Most domain registrars offer a return policy. We bought all 3 domains we were testing, ran our test, and then got a refund for the 2 we didn’t use!

– Another great test would be to measure CTR on ads, or A/B test on a landing page. We didn’t have time for that, but I’d love to hear if you’ve run an experiment like that.

As always, comments and questions are appreciated!

If you liked this – consider sharing it so your friends don’t buy shitty domain names. You may also want to subscribe for new posts via Email or RSS. Our next article will be detailed explanation of Steve Blank & Startup Weekend’s Customer Development collaboration – SWNext – and how we think it fits into the greater startup ecosystem.

Customer Development Made Easy…

by Justin Wilcox -

Price Testing: How to Test your Price

Imagine you come up with an app that eliminates the need for haircuts. It’s amazing, it’s innovative, it’s game-changing.

You want to milk this opportunity for everything it’s worth, but you’ve got some questions on how to do that:

Pricing. Since just about everybody can use it, will you make more money charging $0.99 for it, or since it’ll save a few people a lot of money, should you charge $99?

Target Segment. Is it best to target Supercuts customers who clearly hate getting haircuts so much they’re willing to walk around looking like shit?  Or should you target vain power brokers who would love to look perfect all the time?

Marketing. What’s the best marketing message:

Look your hairy best!

or

No more hair salon small talk.  You’re welcome.

Before Crowdtesting

If you wanted to know which combination of the above generated the most revenue, you had one choice:

  1. Build the product, and then a/b test it.

Sure, you could a/b test landing pages before you built the product to see which combination got you more email addresses, but you’re not going to be able to pay employees in email addresses.  And what if the landing page skews your results (e.g. what if Supercuts customers give out their email addresses more easily than CEOs)?

At the end of the day, we want to make our business decisions not counting visitors, Facebook likes, or email signups.  We want to base them on $.  Crowdtesting helps us do that.

What is Crowdtesting?

Crowdtesting is the combination of crowdfunding and a/b testing to validate business model hypotheses. But that’s a boring definition.  This is better:

Crowdtesting will tell you how much $ your idea is worth, before you build it.

Here’s the video version from the 2012 Lean Startup Conference:

Crowdtesting in action

Some screenshots from the “crowdtesting” experiment currently running for Bounce.

Crowdtesting Step-by-Step

Step #1 – Come up with an idea for a product

While the principles apply to any opportunity, this particular technique is probably best suited for B2C opportunities that want to make money.  If you’re doing an ad supported, or “why does everyone keep asking us how we’ll make money?” play, I’m sorry, I don’t have answers for you.

Step #2 – Figure out what you want to test

In my case, I wanted to know which of these would make more money:

  1. Selling Bounce directly to people who run late
  2. Offering Bounce as a gift people could give to others who run late

and then I wanted to know the optimal price point for the winner of the above.

Step #3 – Fork Selfstarter

The Lockitron folks were kind enough to open source the crowdfunding platform they built – Selfstarter.  That makes it easy for us to launch our own crowdfunding project, and incorporate a/b testing.

Step #4 – Setup Amazon Payments

It can take a couple days to get your Amazon Payments account approved, which you’ll use to accept people’s credit card info, so be sure to start this process well in advance. Instructions are in the Selfstarter FAQ.

Note: I got a “sorry you don’t meet the requirements of a business account”-type email when I first signed up but when I told them what I was doing, I eventually got approval.

Step #5 – Setup A/B Testing

The Experiments functionality within Google Analytics is terrific for this kind of project.  I actually tried to use them but I ran into trouble running two Selfstarters at once.  I’m sure it’s a solvable problem, I just didn’t have time to resolve it.

Instead I simply ran one variation at the time (e.g. $10 instead of $5), and added a “variation” column to my orders table so I could count the number of pre-orders for each variation. Since the vast majority of my traffic was driven by an email list I segmented (more below), I was able to control exactly how many people saw each variation, and could compare apples-to-apples.

Step #6 – Launch

Yeah, baby!

Step #7 – Send traffic

Now you need to send traffic to your campaign. The great part about this step is that it’s fantastic practice to see how easy it’ll be to generate interest if you actually build the product.

As for how much you’ll need, I’m no statistician, but my thinking is, “just enough to run your experiment.”  So far my experiments have been fairly conclusive, so I’ve gotten by with a couple thousand visitors for each variation.

As far as how I generated my traffic.  I had posted a landing page collecting email addresses for people interested in Bounce for iPhone, before.  The majority of my traffic came from Hacker News, press, and emails to folks who signed up on Bounce’s landing page.

Step #8 – Analyze the results

Once the orders come in, the fun starts!

conversion_rate_spreadsheet

The metric I found most useful was $/visitor.  For example:

  • With a $5 price tag, 1.4% of visitors pre-order Bounce. That’s $.07/visitor.
  • With a $10 price tag, 1.7% of visitors pre-order Bounce. That’s $.17/visitor.

Sample size: 11,108

The combination of messaging and price points that generates the biggest $/visitor is the combination you want.

Important Notes:

There are a few non-obvious things you want to keep in mind when launching a crowdtesting project:

Crowdtesting isn’t perfect.  I’m clearly a fan, but crowdtesting is by no means perfect. It’s probably best suited for B2C plays that can charge money. We also don’t have data yet on how accurately it predicts sales once the product launches. You need to be very aware of where your traffic comes from, because that can skew your results as well. Some mitigations for these issues are below. Overall, crowdtesting is no silver bullet, but it’s clearly better than email sign-ups on a landing page or building a product no one wants.

Your goal ISN’T to raise lots of money.  Avoid trying to bring in tons of money during this campaign, that’s not the goal.  The goal is to test a hypothesis in a scenario that resembles market conditions when your product actually launches.  If you make getting lots of money a priority, you’re likely to try tactics that won’t be applicable when your product launches.  In fact, I eliminated the total $ raised from my crowdtest altogether – Bounce’s published “goal” was in terms of backers (5,000).

Don’t sell your story.  A lot of consumers support crowdfunding projects not because they want the rewards, but because they want to support the person raising the money.  You don’t want that.  You want people pre-ordering your product because they want it so badly, they’re willing to put down money early, to ensure it gets made.  Avoid talking much about yourself during the campaign and instead focus on the value prop – that’s what you’re trying to test.

Do no harm.  Crowdtesting only works because consumers trust the crowdfunding process.  If crowdtesters start charging credit cards before they build their products, don’t deliver on the promises they make, or otherwise mislead consumers, our customers will lose faith in the process and the tool will lose its value.

Set your goal high.  Remember, your primary objective is to test a hypothesis.  If you set a goal that’s low and you hit it, you’re obligated to build the product (see “Do no harm”), even if it turns out your $’s/visitor is much less than you need for this venture to be profitable.  Instead, set your goal to a high, but not outrageous level so that if you happen to hit it, you’d be happy to build the product.

Prime the pump.  You know how baristas never put an empty tip jar out?  It’s because people feel weird being the first to do something (e.g. first person to tip, first person to back a crowdfunding project, etc.).  Since we want to mimic real-world market conditions as quickly as possible, we don’t want the first visitors to our site to feel like “oh, well no one else has supported this, so it must be dumb.”  To avoid that, I started my backer count at 114 (with a goal of trying to reach 5,000).  It wasn’t so high that I felt consumers would feel mislead about the popularity of the product, but it also wasn’t an empty tip jar.

Don’t charge credit cards until the product launches.  Kickstarter lets you have customer money as soon as you reach your goal, but unless you have to have the money to pay for upfront costs, I’m a much bigger fan of not charging customers until you’ve actually launched the product.  This will build more trust with your customers, it gives you an incentive to deliver, and if you happen to miss a deadline, at least you earn interest on your customer’s cash.

Only the beginning

This was a first crack at crowdtesting. As we learn more we’ll continue to post information. If you’re interested, you can subscribe for updates via Email or RSS.

Please, if you have any questions or comments send them our way. Also, if you run your own crowdtest, we’d love to hear about it (and have you post about it)!

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