Andrew: Haystack.com. That’s where you’re going to find the right designer for your next project. If you want to build a website that people are willing to pay for, you need it designed well. You need it to be designed in a way that communicates authority, a way that communicates that you’re going to be around long enough to service what people are paying for. You’re going to need it to feel like home for you too. So how do you do that? You go to Haystack.com, this website. You scroll around. You find the designer that just makes you feel comfortable, that makes you feel like you could work with them. Now, if you want to work with them one-on-one, you don’t have to do it all by phone or all by Skype, though you can. But you can find a person, you can find a designer right in your city and that’s just by clicking over on any city tab right here. You click on the city that you happen to be in. In this case, we’ll click on Miami and you can...
Full program includes
– Learn how Wil’s sites make money before he spends it. (I tried to excerpt this part, but it hard to understand out of context, so listen for it in the program.)
– Hear Wil talk about the simple distinction that he (and people like Jason Fried of 37Signals) made that helped him go from building sites for other people to owning his own sites.
– Hear the advice Wil has for you about building a pay wall-based business.
Edited Excerpts
Get critical mass
With Go Big, it’s just not easy to replicate twenty thousand investors or two hundred and fifty thousand startups. Over at GotCast.com where we cast for every major television show, it’s difficult to have those relationships with all the major networks. You either have them or you don’t. A free model doesn’t really solve that problem. So in each case we have something a little bit more proprietary behind the paywall.
Separate your order process into two steps
The checkout path is critical. You have to isolate your problems.
For example, if I put all of my login credentials as well as my payment credentials on the same page and the customer bounces, I have no idea why the customer bounced. Was it because of price? Was it because they didn’t want the service? But if I separate the two and all of a sudden I see a 100 people again sign up but only 10 people pay, I’ve isolated exactly what the problem is.
What that allows you to do is only fix one problem. So if 100 people are signing up and 10 people are paying, well then I know I can start to play around with just the pricing page.
Test prices at high frequency
When we started, we looked at what do people tend to charge online for a lot of these products, and we figured the right price as about $20
We had this idea of trying every possible price points simultaneously, and it’s really just multivariant testing. And this is circa 2002, where multivariant testing wasn’t widely popular. And so when people came to the site, when they came to the pricing page, we tried all the different prices, all at the same time. So, if ten different people came to the site, they’d probably get ten different prices.
Fast-forward to the end of that experiment, we found out that our average customers are willing to pay $100 to lease their car.
Have something for the big spenders
A one-size-fits-all pricing model isn’t necessarily great for you or the consumer. So what we did with Swapalease, this is early on, is we broke the product up into three price points. So we had kind of your high, medium and low.
And generally speaking the way we weighted the offers for each of the price points was the low offer was what’s the least amount somebody’s willing to pay to just user test the service. So it was always just a get your foot in the door kind of price. The middle price was always something extraordinarily better than the basic package, which is the bulk of what your benefit is, and then the top package was we’ll just give you everything. We’ll send one of our employees to your house if that’s what it takes for you to buy this package. It’s always a much larger price but it kind of gives us the sense for there’s a customer that always wants everything that they can possibly have.
There’s somebody that always wants the penthouse and so you have to have a penthouse. You have to have that available. It also gives you a sense for what the upper limit of your pricing is.
Aim for recurring billing
I would argue that the mistake we made at Swapalease early on is that recurring billing wasn’t quite as popular as it is now and we didn’t do it. In all of our other businesses we do do recurring billing. It’s not foolproof. You know, there’s a fair amount of attrition that comes with recurring billing. You deal with charge backs. You deal with change credit cards. I mean, it’s a tricky business, but at the same time, you start to build some annuity, and you build a reliable revenue stream for your business.
Seed your database
That’s a question I get asked most often. It’s the idea of, “How do you make it a great party without somebody having to show up first?” Nobody wants to show up first, but everybody wants to be at a great party. It’s kind of the same mechanics.
An so, when we set up stuff like Swapalease, what we did was, we just went and went to dealers who already had cars that could be a lease, and we started populating them on the site. Now, nobody really wanted those cars, but ultimately, you didn’t want anybody to come to the site, and see that they were going to be a database record number one.
People tend to make the mistake of, “Hey, we’re going to launch the site, and because it exists, it’ll just self-populate.”
And they don’t just make this mistake with classifieds, it happens in stuff like forum sites, where people try to build discussion boards, and they say, “Hey, the forms exist, now everyone go populate it yourself.” And it doesn’t work. You have to prime the pump with your own listings.
[GoBigNetwork.com] was actually easier, only because I actually knew who the customers were. They were entrepreneurs and investors, so I went out, and I reached out to about 2,000 of my friends, and then I said, “I want to create a profile for you with the contact information I already have. I’m going to send you an email, and you just have to click an activate button. So, essentially, you have to opt-in, but I’m going to do the work for you.”