The last week has been a bit up and down for my April Challenge.  Here's a breakdown.

The Good

I've been contacted about three group orders this month of varying sizes.  The first two are done deals.  The accounts are setup and the invoices are in the email. It may take some time to get the check, but they'll come.  These two were both modest size, right around $1k combined. 

Taken separately either one of these would count as completing my challenge, but my intent was to increase single user sales, so I'm not counting them.  Things are looking pretty dim on that front (see The Bad and The Ugly).

The other group deal is very early, but potentially one of the biggest I've been in discussion for.  I estimate anywhere from $10k to $100k. There is still a long way to go and pretty much everything needs to come up Matt for me to pull this off.

The Bad

Last week I raised the price on the checkout page $5 to $25 per year.  Sometime at the beginning of the month I had changed it in all the info pages and emails, but anytime a user went to actually pay they still got the old rate of $20. There was no noticeable drop in signups when I did that, but once I actually changed it on the checkout pages orders slowed.

I was consistently doing 4-7 a day and now I'm at 1-2 a day. I'm not entirely convinced there's a connection since many schools have breaks last week and this week. Plus no one has actually complained about the price change.

Small Sample Size Warning

Looking at last April I see that of the 14 orders, half came after April 23rd. The other 7 are spread randomly in the first 23 days of the month. So it isn't unreasonable to think that things will pick up towards the end of the month, although Easter is much later this year, so that means more school days off and probably less sales. Regardless I'm keeping the new price for the time being.

The Ugly

I sent an email promotion last Sunday night to the 280 users who regularly use the site on the free plan. The deal was $5 for 6 months of premium features. I sent it on Sunday night since that is when the site is most active (for all types of users). I thought if I could catch them while they were actually using the site it would help convert them. Also I encouraged them to forward the deal to their friends.

Before the email went out I estimated roughly 5% conversion, so maybe 15 would take advantage (the original 280, plus a few tell a friends). 3 people have taken the deal.

So, yeah, that didn't go well.

One of the first steps of my April Challenge was to send two survey emails. The first was to users who paid for the premium service since the beginning of the year. The second group was users who signed up for the trial, but gave up and haven't returned to the site in at least two weeks. The emails went out a week ago. These are the results.

Paying Users

There were 410 people in this group.  They all received the same email.

Subject: PlanbookEdu Feedback - Win a $25 Amazon.com Gift Card

Text:

Hi {email},
Earlier this year you signed up for PlanbookEdu.com. We hope that your experience with the program has been positive and we've made your lesson planning easier.

We would like to know what you feel has been the most valuable benefit of using PlanbookEdu.

Simply reply to this email with your feedback and you will be entered in a drawing to win a $25 Amazon.com gift card.

Thanks,
PlanbookEdu Support
800-378-7131
planbookedu.com
facebook.com/planbookedu

Response

Of the 410 people emailed 46 (~11%) responded. The responses were overwhelmingly positive.  21 used the word "love" at some point. To parse the data I read and responded to every one. In the process I kept a list of benefits and would add a tick anytime one was mentioned.  By the end I had pretty good idea what everyone like the best.

I'm going to use this information to revise some of the wording on the homepage to better appeal to the benefits that really stood out.

Also, even though I didn't ask for it, many users suggested features they'd like to see.  There were two that clearly stood out. They were already near the top of my list of things to add, so this justified my belief that they are high priority items.

Users That Gave Up

There were 977 people in this group.  They all received the same email.

Subject: PlanbookEdu Feedback - Win a $25 Amazon.com Gift Card

Text:

Hi {email},
Earlier this year you tried out PlanbookEdu.com. We noticed that you haven't returned lately and would like to find out why.

We are constantly trying to improve our service and any feedback you'd like to provide would be extremely helpful. Was it to complicated? Did you find a better solution?

Simply reply to this email with your feedback and you will be entered in a drawing to win a $25 Amazon.com gift card.

Thanks,
PlanbookEdu Support
800-378-7131
planbookedu.com
facebook.com/planbookedu

Response

The response to this email wasn't nearly as good. I guess this can be expected since this group has already given up on the site they probably don't care enough to response. The chance at a $25 Amazon.com gift card wasn't motivating enough.

There were 25 responses, approximately 2.5%. The responses from the first group generally fell into 5-6 main areas with two benefits really standing out. This group had responses all over the map. The most common being that they haven't had time to "play with it".

Combining the people who haven't had time and those that were confused (2 people wrote that) makes me think I need to do more to ease the learning curve. I've already done a lot to make the transition easy, but there is clearly more that can be done here.

The Contest

Since responses have pretty much stopped coming in I'll be picking winners to the contest in the next day or two. Here's my completely scientific and fair process:

1. Go to Gmail and do a search that will filter out just responses for that group.
2. Get the total count for responses
3. Go to random.org and generate a "true random number" between 1 and the total number of responses.
4. Count down in Gmail until I hit the random number.

What I'll Do Different Next Time

The first thing I'd change is have different subjects for the two groups. This would have made it easier to separate the responses. Plus, I think a better subject would have gotten more responses for the group of people who gave up.

I thought very long about giving a guaranteed reward.  Something like a $5 Amazon.com gift card just for responding. I may do this for the group that gave up, rolling out smaller email batches at a time until I hit some budget limit, say $150.

April is traditionally the worst month of the year for my online planbook business. So far this year I'm seeing about 4x increase over the same month in 2010. So I could just accept that April will get a nice bump, but still only be 1% of my yearly revenue (I had to round up to get to 1%). Nah, forget that.

The Challenge

In April 2010 there were 14 sales totaling $280. I've already had 16 orders in the first 4 days of the month, so just beating that isn't enough. My goal is to beat that revenue number in a single day.  It can be any day of the month, so that gives me 30 chances...well 26 chances since the month is already 4 days old and I haven't done it yet.

Since there is a 14 day trial it's hard to predict exactly when people will upgrade to the paid version.  This is a good thing, since it prevents me from targeting a single day. The best case scenario is I complete the challenge and also have a bunch of really great days as well.

No Coding

None of the things I'm trying involve adding new features to the site. I know there are features missing and as coder it's tempting to try to build the site by adding features. The purpose of this challenge is to force myself to concentrate on marketing and sales skills.

History

Getting 15 or more orders in a single day isn't unprecedented. I've done it 30 times before. But every one of those days was in the busy August to October period.

The Plan

Gather Intel

One of the first things I want to do is learn. The two pieces of information I want to learn are:

1. From those who signed up, what is the single greatest benefit.
2. From those who didn't, why?

This information will be used to help focus the content on the landing page.  I hope this will help with conversions.

As an incentive I'm going to randomly select one of the responds from each group and give them a $25 Amazon gift card.

For these type of surveys I generally don't use any special tool. The user just has to hit reply and type their thoughts. I do it this way because replying to an email is easier then going to a 3rd party site and filling out a form.

Also I want free form responses. Say I select 5 possible benefits and an other option where a user can type in a response, most users will select from the list. By doing that I've already corralled them into selecting from what I believe the benefits are. 

There won't be so many response that I can't just go through and read each individually to gather the data. I don't need any fancy reports here.

Raise Price

About a week ago I bumped the price on the homepage to be $25 per year from $20 per year. I didn't actually change it in the system, which allows people who signed up for the trial before the bump to still get in at the $20 amount. I'll change the price in the system to match in the next few days. This is a permanent change - not just for the month.

Buy More Ads

Notice I said the challenge was to beat the revenue number. I'm willing to shave off a few points of profit to get this done. Now because of the 14 day trail I really need to be driving new signups in the beginning half of the month.  If someone signs up on April 25th they probably won't upgrade to premium until May and that doesn't help me here.

I should mention I cheated planned ahead and bumped my AdWords budget to $40/day around mid March. The result was 883 new signups, which is my 3rd best month of all time.

Discounts

There is a group of users that access the site regularly, but never upgraded to a premium account, instead sticking with the free version. I'm going to send an email to these users with a $5 for 6 months promotion. I'm not sure how big this group is just yet, but roughly 300-500 users I believe. The day this email goes out will probably be my best chance to eclipse $280 in a day.

I will have to do a bit of coding for the 6 month plan. I figure this isn't a new feature, so I'm not breaking any rules. I'm going with 6 months because it has a "less commitment" feel to it, plus it will cover the end of this school year and the beginning of the next school year.

SEO

I do pretty well for a lot of keywords, but I've never really tracked my Google performance. As part of the AppSumo Lean Startup bundle I got 4 months of Ginzametrics, which is a keyword tracking tool.  My plan is to pick 5 words I already rank well for and 5 other words that I wished I ranked better for and track those.  Then using the intel gathered from the surveys mention above I'm going to rewrite some of the content to target the 5 keywords I want to improve on.

I probably won't get much of a boost from this this month, but it's something that could payoff down the road.

Press

Although I've gotten mentioned on the national teacher's union website and Mashable that wasn't my own doing. I didn't even know about the articles until users started clicking through.

In the past when I've reached out to education blogs and had little success. I realize the success rate for these cold emails is low. I still feel there is room to refine my approach do better.

My plan here is to pick out 5-10 education blogs/news sites I really want to get mentioned on and put together emails for each one.

I'm also going to put together a press pack, which, in theory, makes it easier to write about my site.

Track My Progress

I'll be making posts as I tackle each of the parts above so make sure to sign up for my RSS feed of follow me on Twitter.

In the past (see below) I've participated in April Fools' jokes, but this year I'm going the other way.

Drag the image below to your bookmarks bar and you've got yourself an HTML5 chainsaw for destroying lame April Fools' jokes. Or just click to activate on this page. Use your left mouse button to cut away the page.

Mr Cutty

Easter Eggs

There are a few Easter April Fools' Eggs that are triggered by using this on certain websites.  You could look at the code to figure them out, but what fun is that? Give it a try at the most popular code hosting site, or the best known tech news blog or your favorite search engine. I had a bunch more planned, but just ran out of time.

Code

The code for this is available on GitHub. In addition to the default chainsaw there are several other weapons that are used for the April Fools' Eggs mention above.  Take a look at any of the files in /src/weapons to see how to create your own. I'll be taking pull requests and doing updates throughout the day. Watch my Twitter account for updates.

Sound

Sound effects are off by default. Look for an icon in the upper left to enable. I spent a lot of time and my own money producing these so please check them out.

Compatibility

• Chrome 10 works great
• Firefox 4 works, but can be slow
• Safari 5 works great, can be slightly slow at times
• IE9 works, but carnage only flows left and right, not down. I don't care enough to look into it.
• All others untested

April Fools' Past

2009

This was my first year making an April Fools' post and it was another code-y one.  It was a jQuery plugin that would hide a blog post and only reveal it a bit at a time. I was mocking the newish trend (at the time) to break posts into multiple pages to increase page views. The post made TechCrunch's April Fools' post, which was basically a giant list of all the jokes from around the web.

2010

I went with multiple jokes last year.  The first was a post mocking A/B testing and the trend that you could generate a huge conversion increase by making a tiny change. This was also the birth of Mr Cutty!

I also changed the blog design to copy Jonathan Snook's. This was provoked by the rash of claims that one site stole another sites boring, generic design. Just because another site has some blue gradients doesn't mean they copied your design!

I also changed it for my Twitter avatar and had some fun there.

@snookca was great and played right back.

Of course some people missed the joke.  I actually got a fair amount of hate both in the post's comments and on twitter.

Some people got pretty close to making the April Fools' connection.

Later in the day I switched the design to a copy of Chris Shifflet's blog, included another comically bad Photoshop avatar.

By this point most people were on to me and I didn't get any hate.

Starting next week TechStars will be holding a March Madness-esq elimination tournament for startups. There will be 64 startups going head-to-head over 6 rounds with the winner advancing until only one remains. Who wins will be determined solely by voting on the site This or That.

The premise is simple and it should be entertaining (here's my entry - retweet support appreciated). I think it could be better though.  Here's what I'd change.

Voting

Popularity Contest

The way the voting works right now the startup with most votes in each head-to-head matchup advances. Unfortunately, this could lead to the scenario where a particular startup (or two) with founders with strong social media presences rallying their followers and stealing the competition. In this case it isn't the better startup winning it's the one with the founders with the biggest influence.

Hopefully there will be enough people voting in the contest that no one influencer can dominate.

But what would be better is if the general populous vote only made up 33% of the score.  The rest coming from TechStars staff (33%) and a select group of notable people in the community (33%).

Public Votes

I'm not super familiar with the This or That site, but looking at it just now it doesn't seem like you can see who voted and what they voted for. Combine this with the above change and now things are getting interesting. It would be great to see how the TechStars staff and the select notable judges are voting.

Vote Comments

It would also be cool if you could include a short comment with your vote. Not only would this help the startups, but anyone following the competition would learn as well. There are discussions for each match, so hopefully there will be some good, HN-style debate.

Categories

There doesn't seem to be any criteria for voting. If I'm looking at two random startups how am I supposed to pick one as the "best"? I think it would be fun if each round had a theme and you were supposed to vote based on who won for that theme.

Round of 64 - Best Idea

This is pretty straight forward and open ended. The startup with the best idea gets the vote.

Round of 32 - Best Landing Page

There would be a screenshot of each of the landing pages with links to the actual site. Voters could review both and pick the winner.

Round of 16 - Best Business Plan/Monetization Strategy

Which has the clearest path to making stacks of cash.

Round of 8 - Shark Tank

The final 8 would each appear on a special episode of This Week in Startups. There they would have 60 seconds to pitch their business. At first I was thinking that Jason Calacanis would have to refrain from commenting on the pitches, so as not to sway the vote, but then I realized that would be pretty boring. So instead he can comment, but not give number scores.

The pitches are trimmed and embedded on the voting page. Best 60 second pitch wins.

Round of 4 - The Founding Team on Mixergy Interviews

It's not the idea, but the people, right? The remaining 4 would each have 15 minute Mixergy interviews with Andrew Warner. This is their chance to prove that the idea doesn't matter because the founders are so great.

Once again the interviews would be cut and embedded on the voting page.  Best founding team advances.

Finals - TechStars Interview

This is it. The finals. Only two left.

Each would sit for a standard, no holds barred, TechStars interview, broadcast live. Gripping, right? There's so much talk about the Y-Combinator and TechStars interviews, how awesome would it be to see two live, with the Startups Madness Championship hanging in the balance?

The interviews would be embedded on the voting page and the "best" startup would win.