2. You say that 3 customers complained. Is your product/service so specific that users that can't pay using PayPal complain? Are you sure that they just don't go away? What if you lost 297 customers?
Doubtful. In order to find out why people don't buy, we do heavy, ongoing customer research/surveys/phone calls with people who are on our prospect list but haven't purchased after the expected purchase time frame.
Hardly anyone, ever, has said "I haven't bought your course because you don't support Paypal."
It certainly does help, thank you Ramit. Have you done any split testing to see if your conversions increase with PayPal though? Any thoughts/data on having PayPal as a secondary payment option, for those who prefer it?
No, we haven't split-tested the addition of Paypal. We're constantly running tests, but this is a low-priority one for us based on extensive customer research.
Since we can't test it all, we pick the biggest potential wins (e.g., headlines and offers) and run them as rigorously as possible.
I do know that IMVU offers an insane number of payment options, but I think this may have more to do with their particular userbase.
I use Authorize.net with 1Shoppingcart. It works pretty well. I'm starting to come up against some technical limitations (like a lack of trigger emails for shopping-cart recovery), but overall, I'm very happy with the solution.
EJunkie and Payloadz are actually very good for simple shopping carts. In fact, they can do some pretty complex stuff like cross-sells and affiliate tracking. When you start finding yourself hitting technical limitations (like upsells not working the way you want them to, or you want to do more complex trials), you'll know it's time to upgrade providers.
Unfortunately, nobody wants to learn about statistics -- they just want it to work so they can make more money. I just wrote a post about behavioral change and understanding your users here:
http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/why-personal-finan...
That's why sites like Visual Website Optimizer are getting increasingly good. They use plain language to explain when to keep running the tests.
Again: It's unrealistic to expect lay users to learn statistics. They don't want to become statistical experts, they usually just want to increase sales. This is where software can help.
I think even laymen should learn the why of the statistics, a few paragraphs about statistical significance would have helped the article's author I should think.
As an aside, wow another one of my favourite bloggers responding to a comment of mine on HN this week!
The January effect takes place in a lot of disparate areas.
Gym memberships spike in January. No surprise there.
But what's more interesting is that most self-development books are published in January. Publishers know this is a key time to reach people in the general areas of health & fitness, money, relationships, and work.
I've also had massive traffic spikes on my blog in January when I run a bootcamp/New Year guide.
I wouldn't be surprised if the HN growth happens with people saying, "I really want to learn about tech/entrepreneurship and build something this year."
$14,000 a year is actually a ton of money when you are traveling. I traveled/lived for two solid years in Central/South America and Asia for less than $20,000. It's pretty easy to do. Just don't fly much, stay in cheap rooms $5-6 a night was usually my limit, eat the cheap (and delicious) food you find on street corners in so many other countries, and plan to take the cheapest transportation you can find. That's about it.
They give you $25, since most stuff on Gilt is pretty pricey (most items are $80+, with a lot that extend into the hundreds) my guess is it all works out for them. Plus, they have a rather steep $12 shipping+handling fee.
Andrew is definitely guilty of frequent link-bait headlines, but that doesn't mean the videos are low quality. There are a lot of real gems in that stuff, and it is mainly because Andrew pushes past the unsupported assertions that the grandparent is complaining about and pries for details.
I do watch many of the videos yes. They are well done. He asks good questions and he's not like a typical journalist, because he asks questions he shouldn't. Sometimes he puts the interviewee on the spot and I like how he helps them feel comfortable sharing things they otherwise wouldn't. That part of it is great, because it helps entrepreneurs understand that the reality of business isn't pretty PR releases.
Packaging is important. It can be just as important to focus on the failures, but we don't see that a lot. People don't want to talk about their failures. It's hard to find the failures though, they aren't as famous. We can really learn a lot from failures though.
I believe it may be precisely because we don't see many failures that we keep failing. It's very difficult to understand why a company succeeded. We aren't told about the neighbor who had $1 M to invest or the happenstance that led to a great sale.
It's easier to identify reasons we fail and help us avoid them. Oddly, most failures we read about are due to the environment created by vc. Expectations, short runways, business/techie conflict, yet we continue to be led to believe that vc is a good thing for entrepreneurs. If you run the numbers, the first decision you should make as first time entrepreneur is to avoid VC.
Bootstrap the first one and get VC for the second one. Or, as some suggested to me in the past, get VC for an easy idea you don't really care about. Sell the investors that idea, keep the good one for yourself, then use the money to fuel what you're really passionate about.
For Anu, as a serial entrepreneur, there must have been some failures. Ask lots of questions about those and how they might have been avoided. What lessons were learned? How is trial and error used to make better startups in the future? What things are important to remember and forget? What are some of the less intuitive things to think about? What are some motivations.
Ask Fred about Zynga and why he was quiet about it so long. Why does he think what they were doing is acceptable? Ask him why he doesn't push Zynga to give the ill gotten gains back.
Ask the VCs how to techies can manage expectations and package their startups in a way that can help them better understand them. What motivates them to invest in a particular startup. Do they actually read emails? What's the best way to contact them? What is an introverted techie to do? Can a techie focus on the tech stuff and still succeed in a VC backed startup? How?
For Ed of course, what kinds of prejudices did he face in a world dominated by twenty somethings? How did he balance risk inherent in older life with risk in a startup? What is different at that age than a 20 something entrepreneur? Do people respect his opinions more or was he considered washed up? Why did he wait so long? How has the environment changed over the past couple of decades?
For what it's worth, I think Mixergy is useful just as it is. Why does everyone want people to "cough up their secrets"? There is value in discovering some of this stuff for yourself. The founders Andrew talks to certainly didn't have Mixergy there when their companies were founded, simply spitting out "secrets". Yet, in an hour of listening to Andrew talking to these guys, I learn quite a bit, not just about tactics (which many founders are hesitant to reveal), but about the way that successful people think and formulate ideas.
Hearing other people's stories and ideas is great, but at the end of the day, it's just fluff. Only by trying to start a successful company will you actually figure out what works for you and what doesn't. Obviously, no one wants to hear that. They'd rather hear convenient doctrine, packaged up nicely in a book or podcast, that makes founding a successful company as easy as baking cookies. Here's the newsflash for those people: That recipe doesn't actually exist.
Andrew: you're not a hopester. But what you need to do: really push harder to get your guests to cough up their secrets. You do try. But too many of them end up getting away with answering key questions with vague answers. "Oh, well, we just kept trying and somehow managed to build an customer base." Stuff like that. HOW did that happen? Accident? Happenstance? The guy from Aptimize got away with skimming right past the most important question he could answer: how the hell did he manage to build a business with little or no marketing? His answer was "oh, some SEO and stuff" -- not good enough, not if I'm trying to learn from his experience. The wu-themes guy -- same thing. He "built a community" and then starts charging $100 per theme. Little or no detail about how exactly he built a community -- what specific steps he took -- and what exactly he said and did to get people to cough up $100 for a wordpress theme.
That's been my frustration. It's good to hear these people explain their success, but if you managed to squeeze a bit more detail out of them, I would even consider becoming a Mixergy subscriber.
Good point. I'll push even further. I need to find a good interviewer who'll help me figure out how to get guests to remember the steps that led to big epiphanies.
I don't think anyone has a generic formula for success yet (other wise we would be busy working on it and everyone would be a success story). And in my experience other's people success formula is not going to help me much even if I copy it bit by bit, unless it tune it to my personality/environment/limitations/resources etc.
So I just read these articles (or watch interviews) in the hope of just getting new insights and not looking for a sure way to make millions.
That's a false economy though. You'd have to learn something that you couldn't learn by watching videos for free online or reading books for the costs to justify themselves and the networking would have to be better than you'd be able to do at other paid or free events.
I just installed CloudMagic and it's amazing.