After the invention of cinema, radio, of TV, of billboards, neon tubes and who knows what else, everyone from the hustler to the careful Mom n Pop store had to learn this new medium, otherwise they would potentially, probably lose customers.
I don't want to replicate their business model (what I kind of understood of it) but I do want to use mailchimp better (15 total signups - woohoo) I do want to know how not to be a complete idiot in online marketing.
Just as xx years ago I would have wanted to learn why a newspaper ad did or did not bring in more business.
As a kid I tried selling a photoshop service through newspapers - and I paid for some course - all I remember was the guy hammering on about how each ad in every newspaper must have a campaign code and you must ask for that code on each inbound call.
Nothing much has changed since the 1980s really. We are still tracking our inbound lead generators.
As someone who's working on the exact same concept for another domain (freelance designers), I've come to realize this is one of the least original business models ever (there's about 10 similar services in my space alone).
Still, it fills a need and people are ready to pay for it, which is more than you can say for a lot of startup ideas…
"We’ve now approved over $700k worth of projects in the last
five months and our rate of accepted projects has been growing
at an average of almost 30 percent monthly."
Booked commission revenue is over $100K for those five months. Given that growth is ramping up, they're likely booking over $30K in commissions per month now. Actual commission revenue is undoubtedly less due to abandoned projects, non-payments, refunds, and so on. However that's a healthy business and huge kudos to them for a great MVP example.
Good stuff. Congrats to the founders on the pivot and the success.
Getting the MVP approach right is hard. Really hard. Either that, or I have just been doing it wrong. We have one line of business that is our bread and butter. It came up the old fashioned way: getting in the trenches, gutting it out, and tweaking the model until we gained traction. Since then, we have launched no less than 3 new businesses. Two were shutdown and one is currently languishing.
The challenge is marketing. It's hard, there is too much noise, and when the product is not refined, conversions can suffer. So, it can be difficult to discern whether your company is failing because of the minimal product (especially in these days of "high design"), because of some other execution element, or just no market fit.
I also think the MVP approach is suitable to businesses with specific characteristics and these may be relatively rare. In this case, the business already had fairly extensive relationships with its target market on both sides of the equation. That was key, I believe, as much of the marketing legwork had been done and the established trust could override any qualms about such a minimalist approach. Also, the nature of the business was such that simple forms and manual processes were sufficient to start. That is frequently not the case with tech businesses.
This is not to disparage their accomplishments in the slightest. It was an astute pivot and their approach was smart. It's just that the mantra of MVP, fast iterations, fail fast, etc. has been the magic hammer lately, and too many companies have been nails.
This is the kind of writing I love to see from founders. It's first-hand experience, and any advice is accompanied by narrative that explains the line of thought. It doesn't just seem as though it came down on stone tablets from gods of startups. In a word, it's practical.
Funny, this is exactly how I started Folyo (http://folyo.me) as well (which is the same thing but for freelance designers).
The only difference is that I used Posterous as well to get an online archive of each project (you could post directly form Wufoo to Posterous if I remember correctly).
Edit: from reading the post I thought they catered only to app developers. After taking a look at the site, it seems that they do designers, so they're a direct competitor.
Thanks for writing this. I'm launching a product this month and while building it I regularly fall into the trap of trying to create the vision I have in my my head that's fully automated rather than the MVP that requires some manual operation.
Your post reminded me of the recent PG essay [1] "Do Things that Don't Scale" which I also found really useful.
Great post, thank you. I'm wondering, when you "manually contacted the best developers", was this a telephone call or an email? I'm having a hard time finding the "fine line" of annoying telemarketing call or not. Although the service I provide would genuinely be useful to the one I contact (as useful as your service), it's hard not to sound like a telemarketer nonetheless.
Isn't anybody going to talk about the irony of a developer service that found success without writing any code? I think the take away is git or ftp, ruby or php, sql or a text file, json or xml. Customers don't care, not even developers. I find that interesting.
Nice work people, I've read a number of your blog posts and one in particular stuck with me (the one about getting press). You've certainly got your own PR and marketing in general nailed, glad to hear you've now nailed your product.
How exactly does the money back guarantee work? After a developer does all the work for a project, the project owner can just say he's not happy with it and wants a refund? There must be some safeguards in place to prevent abuse...
For each milestone or project, the details of the deliverables are put into the system. This way, if there's ever an issue (hasn't been yet), we look at the documentation to make a decision.
Because the projects are vetted as well, this decreases the chances of this happening.
Slightly off topic, but the website of the company being talked about in this article (https://ooomf.com/) take a REALLY long time to load on my computer.
It instantly reminded me of simple as well. Both top fixed headers with orange buttons and large BG image with a white background. There are more for sure. The basic app/tool website layout.
Didn't mean to come off so accusatory. I had simple open in another tab at the time and thought it was weird that the sign in link had changed text before I realized what was going on :)
This is encouraging. But it's not an MVP approach as much as a validation approach. They validated the idea/product with Mailchimp. The product didn't come until they started building something to "productize" what had already been validated manually.
This is what I want to do with a new type of email-based shopping experience. We'll see.
Great post. I especially loved the screen shots of the signup and payment forms that very clearly had Wufoo branding all over them. It really goes to show that if you have a good idea you don't need to have all your I's dotted and T's crossed in your MVP; If people like the idea they'll look past those little lumps.
There are several players in this field. Where are you sourcing all the project/clients from? I understand the connection to developers. What about the clients?
I prefer to use self hosted autoresponders using a 3rd parties SMTP service (like Sendgrid or Amazon SES). Much cheaper and just as reliable (you pay 1 cent per 1000 emails sent, no pay-per-user-per-month).
You'll need to spend $XXX on a self hosted autoresponder first though, Interspire or arpReach are good.
I believe it's 25k worth of projects submitted to their site in the first 3 months, from which they take a 15% commission fee (though they started with a $10 fee).
