(Editor’s Note: The Start-up Chronicles is a weekly feature giving an inside view of the trials of a bootstrapped start-up – The Cost Savings Guy. CEO and founder Bruce Judson is also the author of “Go It Alone!: The Secret to Building A Successful Business on Your Own” and a senior faculty fellow at the Yale School of Management.)
The roll-out of The Cost Savings Guy continues. As I wrote in my last column, our ability to generate traffic exceeds expectations – but our revenues are underperforming: Conversions of visitors to sales are lower than anticipated.
All of my experience and intuition says that focusing on generating more and more traffic to a new, seemingly underperforming site is not the road to success. I need to know the site itself is leading visitors to appropriately engage with our service.
Fortunately, I have a number of very smart friends, so I pulled out my Rolodex and starting dialing. My first calls - to people who run successful interactive agencies - quickly took on a repeating pattern: I was immediately asked me for a slew of numbers, and I could hear the mild shock and disapproval in their voices when I said I needed to look these up. It was clear that they could not believe I wasn’t intimately studying all of the data my site was generating.
Next, I phoned someone who is an ultra-successful Web marketer, but flies below the radar. To my surprise, we spent over five hours on the phone in a single call.
My friend challenged many of the core assumptions about how we were presenting our service to site visitors, and never asked for a single statistic. One of his core points was that we were not giving visitors a strong enough sense of the high value of the free aspects of our service.
I’ll talk more about how the site is changing, in part as a response to this discussion, next week – but there were lessons to be learned from my day on the phone, too:
First: It was the person who was actually running a business and confronting the daily challenges of producing sales that gave me the most useful advice – not the specialists in agencies, despite their depth of knowledge.
Second: Of course detailed performance data matters, but it’s better for guiding the optimization of an ongoing success, as opposed to creatively building your initial efforts.
Third: It’s worth the time to go out of your way to find someone you respect that will give you an unvarnished opinion.
Fourth: When I discussed my five-hour conversation with other colleagues and friends, many asked: “How did you get him to give you such a brutal critical analysis?” The answer was straightforward: He knew I really wanted honest feedback. People genuinely want to be helpful. It’s part of human nature.
I am often on the other side of the fence, and asked for critiques of someone else’s efforts. I receive calls from start-up CEO’s who are seeking advice, but quickly get caught listening to the sound of their own voices.
They don’t engage with me when I ask questions that might suggest radical ways to rethink their efforts. Instead, they focus on justifying their activities to date. Although they don’t realize it, they are not really interested in listening. In effect, they suffer from a hubris that can quickly affect top-tier-VC-backed entrepreneurs.
Few people thrive as entrepreneurs without healthy egos, an engaging ability to sell their ideas and an extraordinary determination to succeed. But when a launch deviates from the plan — as almost all do — these same qualities can get in the way of retooling for success. The founders who are most likely to succeed are the ones who also work at being open to advice and aren’t afraid to approach things differently.
When you’ve won several battles – including fundraising, team building and the launch process - it’s hard to imagine your strategy may be flawed. But ultimate victory may require hearing the unpleasant message of outside advisors.
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