Google Ads → Street Team → Product Hunt

That's the priority order this week.

Our Google Ads campaign has passed it’s 3rd week. We had imagined getting 75 qualified signups by next week; instead we have 4. Why? Because the CPC costs twice as much as we planned ($4 instead of $2), the signup conversion when they actually arrive on our landing page is half what we had seen previously (5.3% instead of 13.8%), and the completion rate is half what we planned (27% instead of 40%). Also, we had planned to spend $5000 by next week, but we’ve only spent $2500. If you adjust for all those issues, we’re only actually off by 7% (4*2*2*2*2 = 64), but it’s still a sobering discrepancy. The fixes?

1. 1. Our campaign manager wants another week of data before making any optimizations, but assures us that we should be able to double the efficiency of the ads before the end of the month. That would get us close to where we want to be.
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5. 2. Our segmented pages were converting well (i.e. Restaurant Memberships), but the ads for those segments serve to far too few searches. So all our traffic is generalized. To solve for this, Kunal and Andrew have built a dynamic new lead page you can segment yourself. Check it out, here: https://withfriends.co - we’ll see how that improves conversion

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2. Conceptually, that should all put us in a place by next week where we can decide if it makes sense to continue chasing this channel, and at what scale. 
   

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   Meanwhile, the street team experiment (which I’m referring to as the Withfriends Walkabout) is underway, but I’ve been having trouble hiring for the job. We’ve put out a call on social media and through personal networks, but only have gotten a single sign up. We’re considering exploring Thumbtack, Upwork, or TaskRabbit for the job, but meanwhile, I’m attempting to take on the remaining records needed to get us to a solid sample size of 500 myself. We’re at 250 already. Here’s the map; blue is where I’ve done runs, up next is at least LES and East Village… could loop back to North Brooklyn, or venture elsewhere. 

Other stats? Averaging 24 businesses per hour over the past 12 hours. So have 10+ hours left to get to 500. That doesn’t include travel time, or followups, so it’s a relatively costly endeavor. About 25% of the businesses in these locations are unqualified (corporate chains, for example), and about 12% are closed. Some business owners aren’t interested, but the majority of those I interact with (30%) just say they need to pass it on to their managers. That said, I have directly interacted with 52 owners through this process - or 20%. That feels like a great number. One, in Ridgewood, was a board member for the local Business Improvement District, and invited me to speak at an upcoming meeting. While we haven’t seen any direct signups yet, we do want to run a full test at 500 before making any conclusions.

Two improvements. The first, that we intend to accomplish this week, is to upgrade the flyer so that it includes a unique link (i.e. withfriends.co/freefornewyork) or something, to help track whether people are not visiting at all, or are not convinced when they visit. The second is a new street team referral page that Kunal has concocted; where any street team member (mostly myself at the moment) can enter any business name and a custom message, and it’ll begin dripping them customizing sign up info. We were previously spending 3 minutes per business, doubling our street team costs in the followup, to get around gatekeepers and any distractions after we handed out the flyers, and this cuts that down to under 30 seconds. It’s really neat; using Four Square, Facebook, and some other email lookup techniques to find their contact automatically. You can check it out here; https://withfriends.co/street_team. Go ahead, write a message to your favorite local spot! This is what we’ll use to launch an actual referrals form later this week.

So. That’s Google Ads, that’s Street Team, and then meanwhile we’re preparing all the materials and strategy to launch next week on Product Hunt. You can see a peek at the materials we’ll be using here, and we hope you’ll all consider helping us spread the word and give feedback once we’re live! The idea is heads down on signups through next Tuesday - and then use how well we’ve hit these benchmarks to make our subsequent strategy for the fall.