Just Another Progress Thread

[AdamMaxum]

Running Adwords targeting local service + city and running FB ads now targeting same cities. Created some quick FB ads using GIMP (really just an image sized correctly since FB doesn't like overlay text)

Surprisingly, not as much action as I had expected for 3 mid size cities targeting local service and willing to pay top dollar for Adwords. I've gotten less than 10 clicks between 3 cities in a couple days showing ads 24 hrs day. I am targeting very specific exact keywords only so that is part of the reason. Maybe I'll bid lower and allow broad phrases to take over and see what happens. Just trying to get some traffic to test my landing pages. FB ads should help send a good bit over weekend.

I connected Lucky Orange to the landing pages so I can watch people who visit via recorded sessions. See if I notice any patterns. So far just the usual quickly scroll and x out type visitors which is normal. I've tweaked my copy and layout a couple times to see if that has any impact, but not enough visits to determine yet.

In the meantime, I'm working on my outline of the website. Already convinced myself I'm going to have it developed regardless of landing page test. This type of website is a bit difficult to test via landing pages because it's not a product or specific service, but running the tests will still be somewhat useful.

Debating between different outlines and functions on the website. Doing sketches and writing notes via word doc. I've found a good way to create website outlines is to draw them on my big whiteboard I have hanging in my office, sketch it out and snap a photo and then send these photos to the developer (or designer) to create the layout and look I want. There are wire-framing sites you can use but freehand is so much easier/faster IMO.

I should have outline of site completed this weekend and sent to developer by Monday. I already have a developer I use and trust so I can skip the search/hiring process which saves time and annoyance. This project is big so I may need to bring another one in, but we shall see. I estimate the cost to be below 5k for the website which isn't bad for a project this complex. The website is a directory + search engine style website so it's not a simple wordpress site. Timeline - within 60 days should have a working demo close to launch.

Design of website = as simple as possible. Think almost Google simple in terms of layout/color.

Debating on setting up LLC now or waiting....will probably create now to run costs under sooner and setup the biz bank account (my accountant yells at me about this stuff) and it takes a few weeks to get documents from legalzoom.

 

[AdamMaxum]

Update time.

After another 2 months, not a whole lot to say...yet.

Development of course took longer than I wanted. It's a fairly complicated website so I can't fault the developers too much since it's just a couple guys. I'll probably need to bring in a better/US developer if this thing takes off though so I can have faster results when issues pop up.

We just launched the website live, but there are still bugs and issues that I want to iron out before exposing it here in the forum. That should be another week or so of working them out with dev team.

Now that the site is up and running it's time to populate it. This is where the hard work starts. Convincing businesses to sign up for a new concept.

As soon as I'm comfortable with the flow of the website (after bugs are fixed) it's time to sell the concept to businesses.

Goal 1: Get a business to sign up and input their credit card info
Goal 2: Get a customer to use the offer and redeem via my platform

If I can accomplish this feat than I have the beginnings of an awesome marketplace so this is my priority. The more businesses who sign on and the more customers who redeem, the merrier. It's the first transaction I'm after as my primary goal because that's what will validate the concept and provide me with the starting feedback loop.

Stay tuned!

Cost totals
* Development - almost $8k
* LLC/reg agent - $350
* Design work - $175
* Domain - $25
* Hosting - $15 month (expect this to increase as visits grow)
* Emails - $10 month

 

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[AdamMaxum]

I'm posting this in the general forum, so I'll keep some specifics of the business hidden...for now.

I've decided to pursue a big idea. This isn't your typical Amazon sales business. My business is in the same vein as homeadvisor, angieslist, thumbtack in terms of target audience and style.

Little background on me - Internet marketer. 32 yrs old. Got lazy for a few years due to $$ and freedom. Determined to create something big of my own and provide value.

And so we begin...

To date, here's what I've done since Monday when I decided to commit to this idea after validating need/entry/control/scale/time - and believing it can generate revenue.

-> Bought domain on namecheap

-> Created simple logo in GIMP (nothing fancy, just unique font+color w/tagline) (recommend if you want free photoshop type program)

-> Setup google business email

-> Started sending emails to local businesses under new email - collecting feedback, seeing their response (nothing so far)

->Bought leadpages subscription - setup main landing page, cloned main to use for multiple cities. Connected to domain to landing pages w/subdomain URL. (why doesn't leadpages let you simply show your landing page on the main URL....bad move on their part)

-> Setup Adwords campaign using landing page URLs - targeting 2 cities + business type to start. Goal is to validate my current business model/idea before committing to build out an entire website with all the bells/whistles. No pre-set spend limit. Will analyze spend/results each day and see what happens. Hoping to get some emails from people who use the service via the landing pages. May be going about it wrong, but testing traffic to see.

 

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[AdamMaxum]

Might be worth listening to my chats with @Scott and @Contrarian. (See Master Thread in my signature.)

will do! thanks

 

[Scot]

Might be worth listening to my chats with @Scott and @Contrarian. (See Master Thread in my signature.)

I think you meant to tag me haha

 

[Andy Black]

I think you meant to tag me haha

Dammit. You're right, I did mean to say "Listen to my chat with @Scot, it might help."

Glad you found this thread and corrected me.

 

[Scot]

Dammit. You're right, I did mean to say "Listen to my chat with @Scot, it might help."

Glad you found this thread and corrected me.

The missing T in my name has haunted me since birth haha

 

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[AdamMaxum]

Time to share the website with everyone here. Worthyness is the name. Check out link in sig. Still some minor bugs here and there but a good first start.

Since it's brand new, you won't see any results near you. In top left, enter "Syracuse, NY" as your location to populate the results with some demo businesses I added. Feel free to give it a whirl and let me know any feedback/thoughts. USA based for now.

Planning on clearly stating on homepage that these are "cashback" offers next to the $ amount for each listing...lots of other little improvements coming.

Plan is to focus on a few cities to start and grow from there. If any of you have local service businesses, feel free to add yours if you want. Thanks!

 

[AdamMaxum]

Pretty exciting the past week. I've had multiple new businesses sign up for an account and add offers. These are businesses I cold emailed who took the initiative to sign up, add offers and input their credit cards. We're up to 5 businesses and like 8-10 offers. The offers have ranged from $20-50 bucks each which is great news.

-----

email campaign strategy
Maybe this will help someone. I create/open excel and open google search. I search for keywords related to businesses I want to target - ex: botox san antonio - and open google maps. I then start visiting multiple sites opening multiple tabs usually around 10. Visit each site and copy/paste URL into excel.

Scan the website for an email. Usually located in header/footer or contact page. If I don't see it on website I immediately open their FB page and go to the about page on FB. There is usually an email there and it's usually a good one. Copy + paste email into excel and repeat for each website until you have a decent size list.

Open gmail and open a previously sent email with the template I want to use for these businesses/area. Compose 2 emails at once. Copy+paste the subject / body content / email in each one. Personalize the email with business name. Click on the rebump icon at bottom. I use rebump.cc and setup 3 auto follow up emails that go out automatically after I send the initial email. Make sure the emails sound real and not some fake auto bot. They work!

I then send out the emails to everyone on list and repeat with more businesses you find.

----

The focus is on San Antonio and Denver as the two cities to start generating buzz from the customer side since that is where the first businesses to sign up are located. I've been dabbling with Facebook with a side of instagram. Running paid ads to build up the page likes, boost posts, website clicks, etc. No one has claimed an offer yet, but I knew it would take longer than a week to get that side rolling....especially when there aren't many offers on the website yet.

Current focus is continue to get business sign ups in these cities and run paid ads to stat promoting these offers on FB. I'm treating each offer as if I were marketing it for a client. I want to actually have people contact these businesses and pay them (provide value) so that they keep adding new offers and help spread the word for us. I am still confident the customer side will grow easily as we continue to add new offers and buzz takes hold.

On another note - Braintree denied my application after approving it. Disappointing. Stripe is still allowing us to charge biz cards for the time being but I expect them to close my account eventually. I've been going back and forth with an authorize.net provider so it looks like we'll be going with them.

The main bank providers keep talking about the risk of chargebacks with my model, but I know this to not be true as we have multiple layers to prevent businesses from feeling they're being charged for something they didn't approve. People have said it's mostly because the banks just don't know how to interpret my model since it's not something they've encountered before...I'm hoping once we start to do some volume, I'll be able to improve the merchant side with better options. Right now nobody cares about you when you're doing 0 volume.

 

[AdamMaxum]

Well, 2017 is over and 2018 should be an exciting year for the company. I've stuck with this thread (and business so far, ha!..) since the idea back in February/March 2017 and it's come a long way albeit slower than I'd hope for.

2017
Current stats
- approaching 200 users in cities across US
- approaching 40 business users w/offers live on site
- 3900 offers showing
- 2500 businesses added
- no cashback deals claimed yet

Costs
- development (ongoing) = $13.7k
- design = 1k
- business research & outreach (populate platform + outreach to businesses) - 3k
- hosting = $15 mo
- emails = $20 mo
- domain = $25
- LLC = $350
- advertising (to acquire users) = 1k + my time
- FB ads = $500

Total costs around 20k in 2017.

Goals for 2018
1. Acquire over 20k new users
2. Acquire over 500 new businesses
3. Over 15k in processed deals/claims - become profitable
4. Grow traffic to site from all sources to 50k month
5. Implement processes for everything
6. Grow social media platforms (FB, Twitter, IG)
7. Have company appear in major news outlets / PR

My focus in 2018 is to really start growing the business via any way possible.

I hope everyone had a great 2017 and here's to 2018...the best year yet.

 

[AdamMaxum]

Completed the entire outline of the new website over the weekend. This isn't a simple local biz website. This is a going to be a large directory + search style website with sign up pages for both consumers and businesses....so there are a lot of pages I had to sketch out and outline everything with notes to the development team.

Confirmed with developer that he's good to start. Hired him on Upwork and another developer he knows to get started this week. I'm planning between 30-60 days we should have a good demo and plan to launch as soon as we have an MVP. A lot of people spend way too much time trying to get everything perfect before launching, but it's a waste of time to do that with big projects because you can't do SEO or anything if the site isn't launched with pages...so by end of June I should have the website up and running, probably sooner but I like to over-estimate since crap usually happens.

My email outreach hasn't been going very well, but not surprising. I've probably emailed 50-100 businesses in random cities to see if they'd pre-sign, but nothing. Using rebump to auto-follow up with businesses. I did have some consumer side action with people calling and taking action, but not too much. Spent $100 on Adwords just testing traffic and another $40ish on FB. Small businesses like plumbers and electricians are typically non-savvy when it comes to website/internet related things so it's not going to be easy to get to them. Typically they hear about websites years after they've gone mainstream. Am I worried? No, not really because I have multiple angles to attract them once the site launches. I am also not just targeting typical service businesses so they won't be my only targets to start.

Angle 1 - Setup business profiles on the website for them and then email the business letting them know they have a business profile already and need to claim it to do x, y, z. and hook them that way.

Angle 2 - Setup a custom landing page attacking the competition (specifically Google actually) and show them they are over paying and how using my service makes way more sense. I'm gonna have a custom application built to use on this page which should keep them engaged. Send this landing page to businesses via email (maybe some other ways too).

Angle 3 - Hire freelancer to keep reaching out via hooks above and new ones...

From the consumer side, I have a strong belief that once I get some traction with the business sign ups, the people will follow slowly but surely. I'll also set aside paid marketing budget to ramp up visits. Long term goal is SEO traffic, but that's gonna take a year to build up to a healthy level. I'll also focus heavily on PR once the site is in full ready mode. Non-stop emailing news outlets and writers till someone picks it up. I think my biz model has decent PR potential.

While the development is happening, I'll be working on more reach out to businesses, coming up with some designs this week to hand off to developers, outline more of the website specifics, and whatever else comes up.

Oh, decided to go ahead and purchase LLC last night so that's done.

Costs so far = $400-500

 

[Andy Black]

Might be worth listening to my chats with @Scott and @Contrarian. (See Master Thread in my signature.)

 

[AdamMaxum]

Trying to keep weekly updates going, but may turn into monthly until closer to launch of website.

- Developers put together a board in trellio outlining all the functionality for the website taken from my notes and screenshots. Development server and all of that now setup ready to go. I assume actual coding to take place this week. Sent over 3 PSD's for main page designs. Might do some more depending on what developer says, but luckily this dev has a good eye for design so he can take the general look and apply it properly to all inside pages and elements which helps a lot and saves some money.

- Sent out more emails to businesses. As mentioned, had a business reply to form on landing page and so I followed back up with them explaining the biz and asking a couple questions. In return I let them know I was willing to do an SEO audit of their website for free....haven't heard back, but not unusual. Sent out more emails this week.

- Working on some excels to outline categories for businesses and sub-categories for a wide range of industries which will be used within the scope of the website. This will be my project this week. I'm also outlining even more processes and details around certain aspects of the website that I missed or forgot about. You would surprised how many little actions you have to outline for a website...especially one with logins and CC processing and transfers and pop ups...there's a lot.

- Thinking I may want to pre-sign businesses so that I'm not launching with a blank website. Don't know if I want to do that because it's hard to get a response rate from biz owners when there's not much to show yet and to officially be signed up, they need to enter their CC which they won't do till' I have a functioning setup. So, even if I were to get 50+ pre-signs from businesses, after reaching out to them when site launches, I assume I'll only get a fraction to complete sign up anyway so it's probably a waste of time and effort in that respect.

My expectations upon launch are nothing spectacular, but it will allow me to then actually sign up businesses....so as with all websites, there will be some months after launch where the focus will be on signing up the businesses to populate the website. Since it's going to be 'US wide' reach, I may try to focus on some cities over others to get a foundation going and be able to market to the consumers in those cities and actually generate some proven sales. This seems like possibly the best course of action to reach the first pinnacle of securing a revenue generating transaction instead of stretching myself thin. Ideally, the value my service is providing business owners and consumers should make traction relatively easy once I get the ball rolling. We shall see.

I'm debating on hiring an outreach contractor (when site launches). That's going to add at least a couple hundred dollars cash out of pocket every week so to start, I think I'm going to be doing all the hustling until we secure some traction and then I'll pass the outreach to a dedicated support contractor that I train. At the same time, I'll be managing all of the outgoing emails and backend admin processes until revenue starts coming in and then I will train someone to be the support/admin specialist so I can outsource that. I am going to automate the majority of processes such as auto-emails, sign ups, etc...but there will be some manual operations to approve business profiles (reduce spam) and verify some other important info when it comes in. It will be minimal though. Once that stuff happens, I'll be able to focus more on marketing/sales/improving the processes(website) as it continues to grow. This is all hypothetical, but what I have envisioned in my mind at this point.

Costs so far - around $800 (not including my time!)
* LLC/reg agent - $350?
* Design work - $175
* Development work - $250
* Domain / hosting - $25

 

[C & S]

Well done, I can't wait to hear more.

 

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[AdamMaxum]

Time is flying by this year, half over already, dang.

Been 3 weeks since last update. Not a whole lot happening.

- LLC paperwork came in. Will setup business bank acount Tuesday or Wednesday and make sure all expenses start flowing through that account. Will also setup multiple accounts under the business for when the website is ready and sales start flowing in to a specific account to make my accountant happy and for when I sell my business someday.

- Developers are on a good pace, working every week. Should have demo within a week or two with the basic functionalities in place. Looking forward to the next phase where I can actually test the platform and get it closer to launch.

- In the meantime, I hired another developer last week who built a marketing tool I'll be using to attract new business. You can see it here. Fully functional and it only took 2 days and 300 bucks....money well spent I'd say. The tools purpose is to show business owners (specifically businesses selling services to local audience) how much they are spending on Adwords for a lead (not an actual customer), and how signing up for our new platform makes so much more sense. Yes...I'm going after Google =P ... I'm going to be adding some additional features on this tool website once my platform is complete. Maybe send them to the platform I'm creating somehow when they use the tool. I got the idea by seeing other companies create something useful or informational with the goal being to promote their company/product/service through the creation itself.

- I am continuing to send emails to businesses and see if I can secure any pre-sign ups or simply talk about the platform with some businesses and pick their brains. I have a call this week with a plumber who is going to share his feedback....see what he thinks.

- Since I'm an SEO guy I actually already work with around 100 local businesses in one market so I'll be able to leverage those connections to jump-start an area with sign ups on the platform which is helpful. My current plan (which will likely change) is to populate the platform myself immediately upon launch in all the major markets and then focus on the one market I know a lot of business owners in, get them to agree to sign up, and then target my marketing efforts to the consumer in this city area. That way I don't spread myself thin and can more effectively reach people in a specific market to hopefully have some transactions take place and learn and expand from there. I'm a firm believer that starting small, testing, tweaking, improving and growing is the best way to go. With that said, the platform will be available nationwide from the start so it could spread quick potentially...

 

[BrooklynHustle]

Time to share the website with everyone here. Worthyness is the name. Check out link in sig. Still some minor bugs here and there but a good first start.

Since it's brand new, you won't see any results near you. In top left, enter "Syracuse, NY" as your location to populate the results with some demo businesses I added. Feel free to give it a whirl and let me know any feedback/thoughts. USA based for now.

Planning on clearly stating on homepage that these are "cashback" offers next to the $ amount for each listing...lots of other little improvements coming.

Plan is to focus on a few cities to start and grow from there. If any of you have local service businesses, feel free to add yours if you want. Thanks!

Congrats on getting it up there. Website looks clean...

Highly recommend making sure that some of the offers that populate appear "above the fold" or you may be surprised at how many users never even realize that they are there

 

[AdamMaxum]

Congrats on getting it up there. Website looks clean...

Highly recommend making sure that some of the offers that populate appear "above the fold" or you may be surprised at how many users never even realize that they are there

Thanks for the note. Not sure what you're viewing it on but for me on all browsers+ mobile you can see at least the top offers partly.

I am not sold on the current display of the homepage. That's something that will be tested and changed over time I'm sure. I was going for a google + groupon style look.

 

[BrooklynHustle]

Thanks for the note. Not sure what you're viewing it on but for me on all browsers+ mobile you can see at least the top offers partly.

I am not sold on the current display of the homepage. That's something that will be tested and changed over time I'm sure. I was going for a google + groupon style look.

Running a 13" Macbook on Chrome. Here's what I see:

 

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[kaizening]

Hey Adam, great action so far. I saw your post on the Inside and think your offer makes a lot of sense for businesses.

Just wanted to leave a quick impression that I had when visiting the site: Cash back doesn't mean much to me as a customer unless I can see the price I will pay.

I saw "$120 cash back for a whole house carbon filter" for Adam's Plumbing, but I have no idea how much something like that would cost normally.

Keep up the action!

 

[Envious]

Hey Adam,

Great thread! I've enjoyed reading your progress and seeing this site up and running.

I would like to point out a suggestion for your site, when I went onto it, it was quite empty and it didn't really portray what the site actually does in the first few seconds.

Could you have a selection of the offers you have on the front page? So as soon as someone goes onto your site, they can see the types of offers available straight away which might encourage them to explore the site further?

Not sure if it's a viable suggestion but thought I would point it out.

 

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[AdamMaxum]

Update

- still haven't resolved the merchant issue for business charges. You wouldn't believe how slow and difficult these high risk merchant providers are. I've jumped through hoops to get approved and then to be able to connect their API to my website and in both areas they suck. I decided to stick with the original high risk merchant that approved us and try to connect it to the website. Going on 2 weeks trying to implement their API. Really mind boggling how much of a pain it is trying to communicate and get answers from their side.

- I started out emailing businesses convincing them to join our platform. I got 5 sign ups from businesses who added their offers and credit card in 2 cities within 14 days. Not bad right? Well, too slow for my style. As mentioned in my previous posts, I've gone ahead and started adding businesses and offers without their knowledge. I've been busy populating the top 50 cities across the US with offers. I've hired 3 people off upwork to work on this task with my help. I've got 2 people adding businesses to the website and 1 person researching websites and compiling them in an excel. I then add the actual offers because I need to be in control of that part. We've got over 1k businesses added and over 1500 live offers so far.

- Now that we've got a decent number of cities and businesses with offers added, I've got another worker sending out emails to similar businesses in each city convincing them to sign up by using their competitors listing as relevant proof to convince them to join. The end goal is to phase out all the "fake" offers once we get more businesses signed up and adding offers on their own. This will take awhile, but I believe its the best path forward. When people start claiming fake offers, I'll immediately email/call the companies I added and tell them and ideally get them to 'take over' the offers and pay for any future claims that come in.

- With all this going on, my mind is also on advertising. With all these offers on the site now I can start a push with advertising. The biggest goal is to get users to sign up. Once someone signs up I can send them new offers and communicate via email. As users grow, claims will start being made and I'll have proven the concept thoroughly. At that point it's just exposure, exposure exposure and adding new business users to the site to grow it even further.

- Some of my advertising angles I'm going to look at will be..
* pennyhoarder (maybe outside my budget at the moment though) + other similar sites
* bloggers/coupon crowds - get them to review my site, link to me, might have to come up with an affiliate angle for them unless I wanna pay out the butt in ad costs. Maybe get on their email blast.
* social media
* PR - gonna start a hard PR outreach introducing the website. The news loves money saving stories this time of year. *puke*

 

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[AdamMaxum]

Update time.

Everything is progressing nicely. I'm now in advertising mode (although there are still a lot of things happening with website at same time).

I have compiled an excel with bloggers and websites that promote money saving, coupons, deals, moms, etc. almost 100 emails sent so far. Decent response rate.

Results
- Got a blogger to review the website with a 600+ word review and post it to his website/social media for $30. Good deal. Going live this week. You can check it out here if you want.

- Working with a coupon blogger to set up a giveaway through their website and social media (100K+ followers). Cost = $250 + $100 amazon gift card as the giveaway prize. People have to like our FB page, share or join Worthyness as a user to qualify for prize. Should launch this week. Expecting decent results with this one.

- Spoke on phone with Penny Hoarder. 13 million visits a month. Big money saving blog/website. They promote ibotta alot so I figure I'd reach out. They have a minimum 5k starting budget. They offer CPC, CPA, and CPI campaigns. They also have branded posts that stay on the site forever for 10k. yes, expensive, but maybe worth testing with the 5k plan doing cost per user/acquisition. The funny thing talking with sales people is that they make you feel like your website has to "qualify" or pass their test so that you can then pay them thousands of dollars, smh. It's like an interview. If my website passes their 'approval phase' they'll send me a proposal outlining everything and the CPA which I'm most interested in. If it's not bad, I may end up giving it a go as I feel like it would result in a lot of new users who match my demo target. Women + Saving Money.

- Coordinating other posts/giveaways with others, nothing finalized yet. You'd be surprised at how expensive these social posts are. People are charging 300-500 dollars for a single social post per platform. Yes, a single post. So you have to really make sure you're having them post something good otherwise it's a waste. I believe giveaways are the best ROI because you get multiple(s) of people taking action but the prize remains the same. For $100 prize you could get 100's of people to take action, whereas if I were paying to acquire each user it would be a recurring cost over and over of at least a few dollars.

- Some mom blogger wanted 4k for a blog post and another 3k to email her subscriber base. She has 500K visits a month and 80k list. These are the tough decisions because getting in front of them might gain the website hundreds of new sign ups....but you never know for sure until you pay it and do it. For now, I'm sticking with lower cost promos and see where they get us (aside from penny h)

Got a random email from an insurance guy informing me that cashback offers for insurance companies is against law (he was cool about it). I hadn't heard of it before I guess it's called 'rebating' - so I've removed all insurance companies/offers from site. I know law firms/attorneys have something similar which is why I haven't pursued them. The more u know right.

Follow up from last weeks post in bold..

- Solved the merchant issue, finally. Should be implemented and live on site by end of this week. Fingers crossed. still not implemented by development team, new design is taking precedence at this point. New goal, by end of month.

- Almost done adding businesses across top 60 US cities. Around 2k businesses currently on platform, should finish with somewhere around 2300-2500. Currently 2k offers on site, but will be around 4-5k by time I'm done. all businesses added. almost 3k offers now live.

- Added another full time emailer (2 total) - It's working as I've I'm up over 10 real business sign ups and offers added. The goal is to add businesses around each category and then remove the 'fake' offers everytime a real one is added. Looks like it will work nicely this way moving forward. Approaching 20 new business sign ups so far. The CAC for businesses is actually not bad using this outreach method.

- Had a couple businesses reply to emails asking to call them. So I have some calls lined up with them. This helps me learn what they think and what questions they ask. Great thing about my platform is that it's so easy to sell / convince because there are literally no down sides. Yes, spoke to some. They just need to hear it over the phone I guess. I have 3 more calls at least lined up this week with businesses.

- Got my first business email asking why they are on our platform and they didn't consent to being on there. I explained our value proposition and haven't heard back yet, but I expected this to happen...no biggie. they went quiet, onto the next.

- Working on a redesign. Now that we have a lot of offers on the site, I wanted a way to show more offers on screen at once + make it easier to 'save' offers. I also wanted to redesign the mobile view to function/look like an app. Hoping new design to go live by mid december. this timeline looks good still. Design is all there on demo, just tweaking some new pages/functionality. the new display is going to really improve mobile performance...i like what i'm seeing.

- Once I get the merchant situation 100%, I'll start going hard on the advertising to users segment. Right now we haven't had anyone "claim" an offer, which is the next step forward. I'm hoping for a fairly low CAC but we'll see. yup, on par.

- One problem I'm facing at the moment is where I have some real businesses with real offers added, but no one is using the site/claiming them so the businesses aren't getting any claims. I've thought about running Adwords to those pages/offers but when people land on the page they would probably be confused. I've tried promoting on Facebook/social but people are stubborn and will just comment on the post or high bounce rate on direct to site ads. I'll keep testing some ways to gain some real claims for these businesses that have signed up because what I don't want is them to lose confidence and not renew their offers moving forward. I reflected on this and decided to remove the 'expiration dates' for all offers. Now when a business joins and adds offers, they remain until the business logs back in and removes them. This way, I won't lose cashback offers because of expiring. problem solved in that sense. User uptick will help combat low claim rates moving forward too.

 

[Guest92dX]

MJ DeMarco

Always complains about Yahoo finance and other Yahoo news.

Can you get a feature on the news? A press release seems like a way to get more users, which is one of your current problems.

HARO will help with that. It may take a while to get a successful pitch though. It's worth a check every day though.

Also, re-engaging users is important because they may have gone stale after 1 year with 0 real offers.

 

[AdamMaxum]

So, after speaking with some people who have gone through what I'm doing, I'm taking their advice and revamping my strategy with the marketing focus.

* Focus on a vertical (beauty)
* Focus on a specific GEO - Los Angeles
* Target marketing efforts in this city and vertical

So that's the game plan as of now. We'll see how it goes over the next month.

 

[AdamMaxum]

Time slips away fast people! I wasn't sure if I should update this thread or not since it's been so long and it's a bit disappointing, but that's life right?

Where are we at..
- rebranded the site again to Find Local Business Specials Near You - Find a Special

- focusing on building out content in major markets (ie: the yelp strategy) of dominating the Google search results for informational based queries around health/beauty with a focus on pricing.

- added over 15k businesses to website to populate business profiles in major markets

- slowly getting businesses to sign up and claim/create their business accounts

- no cash flow to date

- will soon start outreaching direct to businesses to inform them the site exists, ranks in their market and sell them on claiming/managing their profile and some sort of advertising angle to get cash flow going.

At this point, worse case I build up a website that is ranking well across the major markets and grow search traffic until it reaches a point of value due to all the visits flowing in. It should be relatively easy to start selling to businesses.

The interesting thing is that ranking so far has been pretty easy. Just having the content posted on the website and optimized for SEO with the meta tags is giving us a lot of 1st page rankings across major markets already. This is very promising as we haven't done any real outside link building or authority growth building at all so far. Once that begins, I expect rankings to continue to grow across all the markets we have content in. At that point, the opportunities to sell are endless.

 

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[Bk2498]

Sounds like you've been doing a lot of 'doing' which is the most important part. I enjoyed hearing about how you have got this off the ground in such a hurry, looking forward to seeing whats next. If you can clear this up without giving away anything proprietary, I was just wondering how much time you have spent planning long-term and how you are going to integrate monetization.

 

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[AdamMaxum]

Sounds like you've been doing a lot of 'doing' which is the most important part. I enjoyed hearing about how you have got this off the ground in such a hurry, looking forward to seeing whats next. If you can clear this up without giving away anything proprietary, I was just wondering how much time you have spent planning long-term and how you are going to integrate monetization.

Time planning... came up with idea last month, been bugging myself to do it after running it through 4 step checklist which it passed (steps mentioned in Forever Jobless podcast).. so last week decided to move forward. Outlining website and everything so far spent like 4-6 hrs.

Monetization angle: Similar to Adwords. Businesses pay X amount to advertise their services when they sign up. I've eliminated the chicken and egg issue where most sites need the visits from people (consumers) to draw in the advertisers/businesses. In my model, it doesn't really matter as much upfront to have traffic to lure in the businesses so it eases the burden of generating insane amounts of traffic just to convince businesses to spend X amount to reach them.

I'll expose my business once the website is up and going.

 

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[AdamMaxum]

Not a lot of progress, but want to keep myself focused during the desert.

- Website development is getting started this week. Last week we finalized most design parts and the developers went thru all my notes and quoted me around 7k for the website. Not bad considering it's going to have complex search functionality / payment processing / and separate dashboard admin areas for businesses and customers. I won't be surprised if it reaches 10k, but I'm okay with that for a fully functioning platform within 60 days.

- The website needs payment processing and it looks like we're going to go with Stripe (I let my developer research/decide best option to incorporate). Looks like they have the usual 2.9% rate.

- I submitted my LLC last week and legalzoom flagged it and I needed to call support for 10 minutes. Legalzoom has a decent wait time to get ahold of someone. They flagged my order because the name of my business is a common word misspelled....so I had to clarify that yes, I purposely named it that way..heh..don't they know tech world name conventions?

- I got my first successful business sign up last week! I sent probably 50+ emails to plumbers in different cities directing them to go to a landing page and one actually filled out the short form confirming my suspicions on how a business would reply. So, that's a good sign. I'll send out another 50+ emails this week and see if anyone else submits. The purpose is to collect a little data and if possible, form connections with a few businesses to easily convert into sign ups on the website when it launches.

- On that same note, I've told a few people about my biz idea and some of the designs, and nothing but positive feedback. I know this means nothing, but it's always good to hear 3rd party perspectives..good or bad. The real test will be when the site launches and people start using it for reals.

- Side note: Been reading MJs new book. Good stuff. It rehashes a bit from TMFL, but I have no problem with that. The more it sinks in, the better. After reading through it, I have even more faith in this new venture. Fresh off a -15k failure, I'm twisting the handle for that gold gumball again!

 

[AdamMaxum]

Okay, almost another month has gone by. Seriously?

- We're getting closer to the demo launch. I am anticipating this week sometime. Developer told me June 20 deadline, but I doubt it. I am monitoring progress though through screen recordings and a very rough first demo was sent over last week so progress is being made! My current timeline is to have a fully functional version of the website launched sometime in July and marketing efforts to start heavy in August.

- I finally spoke with a business owner on the phone after emailing quite a bit. She owned a massage place. I gave her my pitch, and to my surprise she had no major opinions on anything except that it was exciting and sounded like a good unique idea. Her only interesting comment was that she felt that for her business, she couldn't give a "discount" of any kind because her services were more expensive and she had to pay her workers a lot of money. Sounded like a lame reason, but she did insist that I follow up with her again once the website is launched.

- I've been looking at competitors in the market space....there aren't really any direct competitors. Groupon and Ebates are probably the closest model type. Was reading Groupons story and similar companies. Groupon turned down 6 billion offer from Google 2 years after launching? Living Social used to be huge and have TV commercials and thousands of employees and now they don't exist. Groupon bought them out for next to nothing. Groupon still exists, but people talk as if the business model is obsolete/dead...which I disagree with. I think it just needs to be done differently. Groupon still makes good money. They've just put themselves in a bad spot. Grew too fast. Went public way too soon. etc.etc. I'd be surprised if they are still around in 5 years.

From research, Groupons model kind of sucks for businesses. Groupon tempts you to lose money on a service or product with the lure of bringing in hundreds of pre-paid new customers. So you discount a service you can afford to lose on in exchange for upselling other items or trying to bring those customers back in down the road (lifetime value).

Example: Oil change cost $49.99 - groupon giveaway $19.99. (hope to break even on discount). Ahh, but Groupon then takes a 50% cut of all of your sales. So you're only getting $10 per oil change. Hundreds of people buy this deal. You lose or make no money. You get bombarded by people trying to claim the offer. These people tend to be 'lower quality' customers. Your service suffers as you're booked solid with people costing you money. It causes tension, and in the end your left with an influx of customers that cost you money, very few come back and you've probably gotten some bad reviews online out of it too.

Another thing that stuck out to me was Groupons terrible customer service and the many complaints online. Clearly they don't give a crap. How can companies that make millions of dollars not refund small amounts to customers who request due to a problem or whatever it is? When my company grows I'm going to make damn sure every customer service member is friendly, understanding and gives people their refund unless it's clearly them trying to gain a freebie or scam the system. Do you really want people trashing your business everywhere over 5 dollars? Check em out - Top 844 Complaints and Reviews about Groupon

Anyway, the above clearly outlines several weak points that "someone" could take advantage of.

Cost update.
* Development - $4,000
* LLC/reg agent - $350
* Design work - $175
* Domain / hosting - $25

 

[AdamMaxum]

Since the website has been live, a steady stream of updates to it have been happening. I still consider it a 'beta' version at this point.

- added "cashback" verbiage next to each price - make it dead simple
- friends, fam, colleague testers/feedback
- testing offers and claims in real time
- testing sign up / login / profile accounts and issues
- tweaking css / design view to enhance appeal

My core group of initial businesses to sign up are all in Florida so this past week and next week won't be good to bug them to sign up. In the meantime, I am moving forward with an email campaign reaching out to business owners in other select cities to try and get any of them to sign up. The plan is, once I get at least one of them to sign up, market the hell out of their offers through paid social targeting that city until I get a customer to submit a successful cashback claim. I may even run adwords for their business name to get people to click on my ad. This should be a cheaper alternative to targeting the usual competitive keywords like 'plumber +city' or whatever it is and will allow me to grab the attention of someone already looking to do business with that specific business. Of course this strategy only works if that business is somewhat known in their local area...which we'll hope is the case.

Working on new advertising, specifically the "sell" page for businesses to sign up. A page that I can attach in my outreach emails that essentially sells the platform and the need to sign up. Basically list all of the reasons why a business would want to sign up and what they get out of it. My real value focus is actually on the business owners. By providing them with a positive useful experience, I'll be able to continually sign up new businesses and grow the platform. The user side will grow as the business side does. I want to define this business as an "advertising company". Open to any thoughts/feedback on this though.