I visited the site and bookmarked it for later.

My other business venture hasn’t been gaining much traction in this off-season, so in my frustration and then burst of happiness yesterday (after finally making another sale) I came up with a new business idea to test in a related industry…

In the past, this would have involved setting up a landing page in Unbounce so I could have a page to test in a couple hours.  (I would then pay to send some AdWords traffic to the page and, based on the initial response, would quickly determine whether the idea was worth pursuing.)

But instead of Unbounce, I remembered KickoffLabs and decided to give it a try.  I set up a simple landing page using the KickoffLabs tool which prompts visitors to enter their email address to join the “early notification list”.

Here’s my experience so far with KickoffLabs:

• First off, the landing page editor itself isn’t nearly as customizable as Unbounce — but this is a good thing.  KickoffLabs provides a few templates and makes page creation as simple as coming up with a headline and short description.
• Extra customizations are easily possible.  They gave sample code for hooking up AdWords conversion tracking when someone clicks to signup (the signup is an Ajax event with no new page load — so I couldn’t just copy & paste in the AdWords script).
• I was also able to easily hook in Visual Website Optimizer code to test a few different headlines.  (I don’t want to prematurely abandon an idea because of a dud headline that gets no response.)
• Best of all (feature-wise), they’ve got the whole viral thing working seamlessly.  When someone signs up with their email address, they are immediately presented with a special referral link along with a Facebook “recommend” button to tell others.  (I put in an incentive that I’m hoping will really motivate people to tell their friends.)  This type of functionality would take hours (and hours) to program myself — and this features is nowhere to be found in Unbounce.
• I ran into an issue at about 10pm at night.  One of the co-founders of the company personally emailed me to make sure I got my issue solved.
• A few minutes later, I noticed that my site was showing up on their discovery page.  This is the page that showcases the different companies using KickoffLabs for their signup pages.  I don’t like the thought of random entrepreneurs reviewing my business ideas before I’ve had much of a chance to take action yet, so I emailed KickoffLabs support to ask them how to be removed from this discovery page.  I got an email back from Scott Watermasysk (the other KickoffLabs co-founder) 20 minutes later that this wasn’t possible, but they planned to add the feature shortly.  About 30 minutes later he replied back and said: “I just deployed a feature which will enable us to (manually) exclude individual landing pages from the discovery page. I have added [your site] to this list.“  That’s amazing support right there!

The customizations I’ve mentioned above (like editing the script headers) are only available on one of their paid plans.  Here’s a trick: sign up for the free plan first.  You’ll be able to immediately sign up for a paid plan at half price for the first 2 months.  There’s at least one other service I know of that helps you create similar viral landing pages, but I certainly doubt they have co-founders that are as committed to your success.

As you can tell, I heartily recommend KickoffLabs as the first step in starting any new business venture.

(Disclaimer: I’ve used my referral link above — they give me a free month of service if you sign up.)

I spent 4 hours last night testing out a new idea. 3.5 hours was spent getting the landing page just right. 30 minutes was spent setting up an AdWords account, choosing keywords, and writing a few ads.

The ads had dismal clicks based on the number of times the ads were shown. Of course, there’s always optimizations that can be made, but the ads contained the essence of my offer and I would have expected them to perform better if there was market interest.

I would have saved at least 3 hours if I would have just put up a butt ugly landing page. It didn’t need a great headline, fancy logo, call to action form, etc. If the ads performed well, I could then test the landing page offer.

By testing ads alone, you really can test a new idea every day. Sure, you might miss some potential winners that would have proven themselves with a little more TLC, but speed is your friend when looking to capture low-hanging-fruit.

All of this assumes you are trying to bring something totally new to the market, which isn’t actually the best idea. There’s probably a reason there’s no competitors. You don’t really need to test if there’s market interest if you are creating a “me-too” business. The fact that competitors exist means there’s a market for what you want to offer. But can you do it better? If not, move on. Find something you can do better than anyone else.

But first things first, don’t build anything until you know people want what you have to offer.

Click the “Contact Me” link above if you need some quick advice.

• who is on my website
• where they are from
• what page they are looking at
• whether they’ve taken an action such as adding an item to their shopping cart

I’ve tried Clicky, Woopra, Chartbeat, and even Spring Metrics.  (Spring Metrics is a sort of a hybrid Chartbeat for ecommerce sites, but I didn’t use it much so this overview will be limited to the first three.  It looks like Chartbeat is coming out with their own ecommerce-focused product: Shopbeat.)

Looks
Chartbeat is the most beautiful of the bunch.  If you’re into aesthetics, Chartbeat is for you.   In contrast, Clicky looks like it was designed by a high school programmer.  Woopra is primarily accessed through a desktop client, which is pretty enough.

Functionality
In terms of base functionality (the bullet points above) Clicky’s got the lead.  With Chartbeat a visitor disappears from the dashboard the moment they leave your site.  While you’d think this is desired — it is “real-time” and all — it is rather annoying to take a look a just miss someone with no reference for what just happened.

There’s also another major difference between Clicky & Chartbeat… Clicky seems to focus on visitors with a drilldown into what pages the visitor is viewing.  Chartbeat on the other hand concentrates on pages.   This provides a nice interface, but there’s a big disconnect as you can’t follow individual visitors.  You can see there are 5 people on page Z, but you can’t see that visitor 1 went from page A -> K -> Z.

Woopra is a mix between the two in how it reports pages and visitors with various views and reports — but it also suffers from Chartbeat’s issue most visibility is lost the second a visitor leaves your site.

Both Clicky & Woopra also have an incredibly useful feature: flagging certain page views as “goals” and then showing you immediately when a visitor reaches this milestone.  I have both set up to notify me when a user takes an action.  If I don’t happen to be viewing the respective interface exactly when this occurs, I can have Clicky send me an email.  Woopra dings my computer.

Price
I have a low volume site, so you’ll have to do your own research on pricing in the higher echelons.  Chartbeat is the most expensive of the bunch — they’ve gotta pay those fantastic interface designers.  The free version of Woopra has all the functionality I need.  Clicky has a free version, but you have to pay $10/mo for crucial features such as tracking goals.

Killer Feature
Woopra also ties in a rather useful feature: live chat.  This helps justify all the time-suck, ADD-driven, I-just-have-to-know-who’s-on-my-site-now craziness over real-time analyics.  When someone reaches a goal (or whenever), you can initiate a nice-looking chat with the user that they can accept or reject.

Given that Woopra is free and has this killer feature, I’ve canceled my paid Clicky account and plan to use Woopra for all my real-time “needs”.  When I can afford it, I’ll probably get a Chartbeat account as well because it looks so cool.  I recommend you give them all for a spin to see what makes you happy.

By the way, I’m running Woopra on this site, so I’m watching you! (Or I’m actually working.)

I expect 100 more will apply before Thursday.

Assuming there were 400 applications started for previous rounds, that means there will be about 400 for this round as well.  Also assuming that at least 20% of the applications are started and never finished, there will be about 320 applications.

They are accepting 100 startups during this round — so everything being equal, Startup Chile applicants have roughly a 30% chance of being accepted for the $40K grant.  Pretty good odds!

Of course, all things aren’t equal.  If you have significant human capital and a great project, your chances are likely closer to 70%.  Good luck!

UPDATE: 400 more applied between Sunday and Thursday… 1100+ total!  According to Start-Up Chile, there were 600+ applicants for the round ending August 11th 2011.  So that’s a 15%-20% chance for all applicants.

Over the next couple years they plan to fund over a thousand businesses.  They are taking applications in stages, accepting about 100 new businesses each time.  The last round acceptance rate was 33%.  This round I’m guessing it will be 15% or less due to the ever-increasing popularity and national press they’ve been getting.  The program is still relatively new, but here’s some resources I’ve found that should help you prepare for the Startup Chile application.

Primary Startup Chile Resources:

• Main Site (check out their blog, faq’s, and generally everything on this site)
• Twitter Account
• YouTube Channel
• Facebook Fan Page (check out the photos)

Good Posts from Participants:

• http://wtnnews.com/articles/8043/
• http://www.nathanlustig.com/2010/12/20/start-up-chile-faq/
• http://www.nathanlustig.com/2011/02/02/chile-at-ten-weeks/
• http://www.shaharnechmad.com/2011/02/19/building-your-dreams-in-chile/
• http://www.nathanlustig.com/2011/05/02/advice-to-new-startup-chile-teams/
• http://www.andrewcross.ca/2011/05/31/start-up-chile-deal-or-no-deal/
• http://hervalicio.us/so-how-about-chile
• http://blog.homeviva.com/2011/07/about-startup-chile-admission-process.html
• http://www.shaharnechmad.com/2011/02/19/building-your-dreams-in-chile/

Other:

• Brenna Loury’s Quora Profile (she’s the Communications Coordinator for Startup Chile)
• Forbes Article
• Some Sample Video Pitches Here, Here
• YouNoodle List of All Current Participants & Applicants.  (627 companies as of 7/31/11, 300 submissions in the last round, so that means they currently have 300+ for this round.)

I plan to share further information about the Startup Chile Application process through an email list.  Sign up below if you’re interested.

I decided to get some paid traffic from AdWords, which I knew wouldn’t convert as well.  It is one thing to get an email from someone you know telling you you should sign up on EmberBox — it is another to click a random ad and see a sparse signup page.  Unsurprisingly, the control for my 2nd VWO test performed at only 16.7% from this fresh PPC traffic.

For the new landing page test, one variation kicked butt.  It was the addition of a simple sentence underneath the signup box: “We value your privacy!”  The addition of this text converts PPC traffic at 52.9% — a 217.65% improvement over the control!

For the past few weeks I’ve been gathering email signups from those expressing early interest in EmberBox.  The first dozen signups came from friends.  The next few dozen came from someone promoting it to their email list.  The most recent few dozen signups came from PPC.  Pay-per-click traffic presents the biggest opportunity to grow my list — but obviously it costs.

When you factor in the cost per click and my optin conversion rate, signups are coming in at about $4 each.  Sure, I can optimize this, but I don’t anticipate getting any significant volume of leads at under $3 each.

The fact that I seem to have struck a nerve in the marketplace excites me.  I have no doubt that if I put AdWords on full throttle I’d be able to get a couple hundred leads per day.  The problem is that I anticipate needing 2,000-10,000 leads to do an official EmberBox prelaunch.  It will cost roughly $8,000 to attract 2,000 leads at $4 each.  I don’t yet have $8,000 to spend.

So I need to raise at least $8,000 so I can create my marketing channel (i.e. my “list”).  This is the very reason I’m creating EmberBox — almost all online businesses need crucial startup capital to make things happen.  They also need a channel to raise this funding.  EmberBox will be this channel.

But the channel isn’t yet built…  This lack of marketing cash has got me thinking: is there anything I can sell to people as soon as they sign up?  If 4% of the people who sign up for an early invite pay $100 for something, I’ll raise an average of $4 per signup.  This will be enough to pay to keep building my list.  Within a month or so I’d have enough people on the list to do a full prelaunch.

Now to the drawing board.  I need to come up with an offer compelling enough that at least 4% will want to pay $100 for it.  I’ll keep you posted.

Last week someone emailed me this feedback, which significantly altered my direction:

I celebrate your innovative entrepreneurial ventures! My business is not one that benefits from this, but I sure wish you well.

A light bulb went off after I read this.  I realized I was appealing to the wrong audience.  For every early-stage entrepreneur with a great business idea, there are 100 “armchair investors” who simply want to invest in something that will bring a return.  I realized that if I could gather together these investors, the entrepreneurs would come.

So I decided to change the concept behind LaunchCap and I gave it a new name: EmberBox.  (This is a domain I purchased almost a year ago for another idea, but when I presented the concept to my wife and gave her a list of 15 of my best original ideas for a new domain name — with EmberBox.com thrown in as well — my wife said “EmberBox” was the best fit.  Saved me $9 on a new domain name!)

With the altered concept and domain, I changed the signup process as well to follow a model used successfully for a recent startup.  I paid $4 for the design, spent a few hours coding the form and Thank You page (there’s a referral program built in) and it is now ready for prelaunch…

Get an EmberBox invite!

I’ve got some moderate marketing planned, but thought I’d release it slowly so I could make changes early on.  Only about 20 people have seen the site so far, but something didn’t feel right…

So I made the first big change.  The concept behind LaunchCap is to raise funding from your future customers before building your business.  If there’s not enough interest to raise your required funding, the business never gets launched.

The problem is that nobody wants to be the first person to help fund a business.  When you see the current funding at $0, it doesn’t seem very promising.

So I modified the model so that Phase 1 is to generate buzz by building up Facebook fans and email subscribers.  The venture isn’t ready for funding until sufficient pre-launch buzz has been generated.  Once enough early buzz is generated, I’ll get everyone to come to the site at once for a super-special deal during the first 24 hours of the funding phase.

People like to take action in groups, it is called “social proof”.   Yeah, people still have to become Facebook fans when there are only a few other fans, but that is a much easier decision to make.  So go ahead and become a fan already!

You can help change that.

Check out the prototype I just set up — LaunchCap!

I have 5-6 things on my list to promote this new venture… the first was publishing this blog post.  I need to get some momentum going, so I’ve made 5 of the “Early Mover” $10 offer slots available.  Take a look at the offer and let me know if there’s anything that needs changing (besides the cheesy video .

Thanks!

The whole “we don’t care how bad it is for you; our food is a novelty” attitude is endearing.

There’s one industry that could really use a player with this attitude: pizza delivery.  The name of this business will be Mean Pizza.

My brother and I came up with this during a car ride from Michigan in the spring of 2010.  He makes great pizza and is always on the lookout for ways to make more money — he is a grossly underpaid teacher.

Here is the concept:

Mean Pizza is a high-end pizza — $20+ per pie — that is lavish with its ingredients and flavor.  It is made for men.  Men are primarily the ones who love pizza anyway, so why not explicitly market your pizza to men?

It is also called “Mean Pizza” because basically we’d be mean.  Soup-Nazi style.  We’d have 5 or 6 different pre-defined pizza selections, each with the ingredients we decided should go together.  If we got a call about removing a topping, we’d say “NO”.  Want cheese-only like a sissy?  NO.  Can’t stand the jalapeños?  TOO BAD!

Yet we also had a few ideas on how to be creative with our niceness and keep people coming back.  Our delivery drivers would be paid a flat tip of $5 per run.  This would be paid by us, not the customer.  When the customer gives a tip, the full amount would be applied to their next order.  So basically everyone would always have a credit towards their next pizza.

My brother was a former pizza delivery driver, so he thought the tip idea was great.

We’d heavily use facebook and would even have GPS tracking on all our drivers.  Customers could see exactly where their pizza was located.  (All payments would be made online, except maybe the tip, so there’d be no reason to steal from the drivers.)

Because we’d have GPS tracking on the drivers, we’d always send them out with at least one extra pizza.  Customers could see if there are any unclaimed pizzas already on deliver and could meet up with the driver to buy it fresh.

It was a long trip driving from Michigan back to North Carolina, so we thought through it a lot.  At this point it doesn’t look like we’ll be taking action on it, so the idea is now released to the public.  (Sorry, I already registered the domain.)

The first problem with word of mouth advertising as it is usually applied to small businesses is that it is synonymous with marketing laziness. To lazy business owners, “word of mouth marketing” means nothing more than “do good work and customers will naturally tell their friends.”

Yet to be successful, word of mouth marketing needs to be helped along. You need to make it easy for your customers to spread your message. There are thousands of ways to prime the pump for word of mouth marketing. Apply some of them to your business.

The second major problem is that these business owners tend to let word of mouth marketing ideas define their entire marketing strategy. They seem to have a disdain for marketing and pride themselves that they don’t need to use any.

The truth is that they can’t employ other marketing methods — there’s no money for it. Their business would go under if they didn’t keep every dollar of their margin. They aren’t accounting for advertising costs.

Don’t sabotage your business with an irrational repulsion for marketing and advertising. If you want to control the growth of your business, marketing is your friend.

When you’re just starting out, there are three things you want in an online store platform:

1. Inexpensive
2. Easy to set up
3. Lots of professionally designed templates for your store

BigCommerce excels at options 1 & 3. Their cheapest plan is $25/month and they’ve got dozens of great designs to choose from. Regarding number 2, they’re not super easy to set up. The slight complexity is more a result of all the features available than any interface issues. Adding a new product is a rather cumbersome process with multiple tabs and dozens of fields (not all required), but you can always import products if you want — and starting out you may not have all that many different products anyway.

They’ve got every option and feature you could ever want. They even give you a mobile version of your store automatically.

If you’re just dabbling I wouldn’t recommend BigCommerce. Their setup fee and monthly charges will get annoying pretty quick if you aren’t making any sales. There is a free trial, however, so maybe you can dabble a bit.

The business end of the toilet paper can’t be more than 10% for most wipes. The rest is a disposable paper handle that stay clean the entire time.

What if there was a reusable toilet paper handle that would enable you to use 80% less toilet paper per year? Would you buy it?

I wouldn’t either. But think of all the “green” people that care about such things as landfills and dead trees. Yes we should all care about such things, but there are people who actually do. This product is for them.

A viral YouTube video could be made for promotion, much like the ultra-successful one for the tongue brush. It would be a massive hit, I know it.

So how does the butt wipe handle work? I envision a soft-ish ball a bit smaller than a hackey sack. This functions as the handle. A single piece of toilet paper is wrapped around. Then you wipe. I guess the piece of toilet paper would have to be smaller than normal to save the most toilet paper.

I actually tried to make a prototype a few months back. I ripped a piece off an old t-shirt and filled it with small rocks from a potted plant. It didn’t work too well.

Sure, there are technical problems with this invention in its current form, but I am confident somebody could spend a few more hours brainstorming and come up with a device that works.

Next time you’re on the pot, think about all the waste.

Herein lies the challenge — how do you get paid every month by your customers?  The simple answer is to ask for their credit card number.  But how will you deal with the following:

• Security implications of storing credit card numbers
• PCI Compliance
• Getting customers to update their expired cards
• Merchant account
• Credit card gateway
• Cancellations
• SSL certificates
• Emails for declined charges
• Emails for approved charges
• Re-charging cards when they are declined
• Cancelling access to you application for non-payment
• Tracking your monthly recurring revenue
• Forecasting future payments
• Free trial periods
• Monthly, quarterly, or yearly billing cycles

The list above isn’t exhaustive.  I’m sure if I lived and breathed this stuff, the list would be 20 times as long.  If you are building a web application, you definitely don’t want to deal with storing credit cards and writing your own billing code. There are deep security issues with how you handle and store credit card info that  could get you into legal trouble if you don’t tread carefully.

Because of this, various recurring billing system platforms have sprung up over the past few years to take this burden off software as a service businesses and other web apps that charge ongoing fees.

Two of the most promising for small businesses are Recurly and Chargify.  This post isn’t meant to be a feature-by-feature comparison.  That is better handled here.  Instead I want to encourage you to:

1. Use a subscription billing platform — don’t build it yourself.
2. Consider how you might want to use the data down-the-road

I hope I’ve already made my first point.  The second point isn’t as straightforward.   Let me give an analogy…

Let’s say I have $50,000 in Bank A.  Bank B comes along and offers me a better rate, so I decide to move the $50K to Bank B.  How would I react if Bank A decided they didn’t think it was secure for me to do this.  As such, they decided I had to prove that I had a secure vehicle to move the money from Bank A to Bank B.  After months of laboring, I was still unsure if they would let me move the money — the kept telling me it wasn’t safe.

Now let’s see how this relates to subscription billing.

If I have 1,000 people who have all promised me $50 per month, that is $50,000 per month in future payments promised to my business.  All of this money doesn’t go straight to my bank, however.  It is first funneled through an online payment gateway and then to a merchant account, who only then gives it to my bank.

Chargify doesn’t want to deal with the liability of storing credit card number on their server — who can blame them, I don’t want to either!  (uhh… that was the biggest reason I had for choosing them I thought.)  So they use a “vault” provided by the payment gateway to store the credit card numbers.  Payment gateways don’t want to come under fire, so they don’t give up this info easily.  Sure, your customers gave their info to you, but the payment gateway doesn’t trust you with this info.  They need to protect the cardholders, and themselves.

Under this model, if you get a better offer from a different merchant account that uses a different payment gateway, it is almost impossible to switch.  Your future payments (and thus your business) are held hostage.

Recurly, on the other hand, takes more risk on themselves by storing the credit card numbers for you.  If you want to switch payment gateways, it is seamless.  The cash flow of your business isn’t held hostage.

One other detail I need to mention… you’re better off going with a merchant account that supports the Authorize.net gateway.  That will give you the most options for online vendors — this is the most popular gateway around and almost everyone supports it.  Just don’t let them force you to hand over the financial keys to your business, i.e. don’t let Authorize.net store your credit card data for you.

Chargify has a much, much, prettier interface and some excellent founders.  (I actually had lunch with Lance Walley and some of his team last February while discussing a venture of mine.)  Yet if I was starting a new business with a recurring revenue model, I would choose Recurly.