Just Another Progress Thread

[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]

- Solved the merchant issue, finally. Should be implemented and live on site by end of this week. Fingers crossed.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

 

[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.

 

[AdamMaxum]

Glad to say things are progressing nicely now in several areas.

- The $350 blogger promotion (give away $100 amazon card) is still running but ends shortly. It has worked out nicely.

Results
+60 new user sign ups on website
+80 twitter followers
+50 FB page likes

- Launched new redesign of website - still tinkering with it, but it's live.

- I negotiated with the penny hoarder and had them come down to $4 CPL so for 5k I am guaranteed 1250 new user sign ups...I may be early doing this, but I'm confident the benefits of doing so will outweigh the cost down the line. If it turns out to be a mistake, at least I'll learn something from it. I signed IO and campaign should start first week of Jan.

- I partnered with another coupon blogger to do another giveaway that went live today - GIVEAWAY: Enter to Win a $100 Gift Card! - Coupons in the News - another $100 prize - costing me $500 to the blogger but he gets pretty good website traffic so hopefully it does okay. If not, another lesson learned. I've already acquired 10 new users today from it so a good start.

- I'm adding a $5 free cash bonus sign up to the website and will use it as incentive to join. Anyone who signs up, and redeems an offer on the website within 90 days of joining, I'll pay them $5 cash to their account. Essentially, I'm giving up the profit on the first claim they make. At this point, if anyone submits a claim, I'll be delighted.

- Business sign ups are averaging 1 a day. We're up to almost 30 live business accounts w/offers on site. The problem I'm running into though is that most of them don't complete sign up because they get scared of adding their credit card. Not sure if there's a way around that, but exploring options and talking to ones who don't sign up.

I have 3 freelancers sending emails everyday to businesses in cities, focusing on one city at a time. This outreach angle is working nicely. They have a template to use and I log in and answer any questions businesses have for now. Eventually I'll train them to reply back to business owners but its vital that I am the communication point for now since they are how I'm going to make money and I want to foster good relationships with every new business sign up.

- I am talking with a couple businesses every week who want to hear more about the company. I think I can do better hyping the business and "selling" it...I'm pretty low key so maybe I'll drink some red bulls before calls to help that out.

Enjoy the holidays everyone!

 

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[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]

First update of 2018 and a bunch has already happened.

I've decided to change my business model...sort of. Instead of requiring users to purchase a service and redeem cashback, I'm going to simplify the process even further which should speed revenue growth. I'll talk more about it after it goes live
As a result, it's time to spend more money and time in development. I'm hoping for a 4-6 week dev timeline, but we'll see. In the meantime, the existing business and model will persist. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think it would have major benefits moving forward.

Seeing good growth in business sign ups and joined users.
Business sign ups to 70+
Joined users = 915

Had our first 2 business inquiries made through website, one for a business that we signed up. Still awaiting the first official cashback redemption.

Hired a sales guy to implement processes and speak on phone with warm biz leads. I did this a week before the realization of changing business model. This may impact sales guy hours/motivation, but we're working on pre-signing businesses to the new model in meantime.

Facebook randomly suspended all my ads I had running a week ago. Of course. After a simple message to their support they replied back next day saying oops, sorry and turned everything back on...so I avoided that potential issue.

I tried out usertesting. com and purchased a couple user tests. $50 a pop is a bit expensive if you ask me, but you can basically have the user do anything you want them to and answer anything you want. I got some good feedback. Users had no issues or complaints with site and said they would use it outside of the test. I have previously used userbob. com and they do a similar thing but you only get a minute. Same results, so I feel comfortable about the layout and flow of site, which is always morale boosting.

Had a company flip out via email that we added their company to the website without their permission. It appears that the wedding planning industry are a very tight knit group who get angry easily, but I digress. Remove the business profile and move on.

 

[AdamMaxum]

So it's been about 8 weeks since I've updated last. I thought it was longer. The new model relaunch is now live, along with the new name, rewardefy. I changed the name because worthyness didn't really convey the meaning of what the brand was and I didn't feel like explaining it everytime someone asks.

The new model is streamlined to be much simpler for users. Instead of purchasing services from a business and snapping a photo of your receipt to redeem the cashback, all you have to do now is call or contact the business to get paid.

A lead gen platform where the businesses add their services and control how much they want to pay for a lead. A % of that amount gets passed back to the lead itself.

Now that it's live, I can really get down to generating new users and traction. Between now and end of summer will be a defining timeline for the company...make it or break it time.

I've acquired over 2k users so far from across the country...not much, but a start.

I've suspended targeting new business sign ups until I can prove users are willing to use the platform itself. So my central focus is now on proving the concept and growing the user base as high as I can. Once I reach a threshold of users actively redeeming offers I'll be able to easily sign up businesses at scale with the proof in hand. It's already an easy sell, but that just seals the deal.

If anyone has any unique ideas/ angles on how to get users to join and partake feel free to share! I'm going to start by reaching out to my existing users and go from there.

 

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[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]

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.

Thanks for the suggestions!

I haven’t gotten into PR yet, but will.



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Guest92dX]

I mentioned the PR stuff because it's a sidewalker's dream to get a rebate. Hell, I even used to think rebates were amazing. Now I think: if your company has the money to give me cash back then lower the fricking price in the first place. Give your best offer not just any offer.

 

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[AdamMaxum]

I mentioned the PR stuff because it's a sidewalker's dream to get a rebate. Hell, I even used to think rebates were amazing. Now I think: if your company has the money to give me cash back then lower the fricking price in the first place. Give your best offer not just any offer.

Yeah good point. From the business perspective in my model the rebate or reward is part of the marketing budget to attract new customers. So lowering their price across the board for a specific service wouldn’t necessarily attract new customers unless they promoted it some other way.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[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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