With CareLogger being a side project, our time available for marketing is limited. We found conversion optimization to be a good way to spend 30 minutes once a week refining our pitch to customers. It also maximizes the amount of signups so we have access to more people to conduct customer development with.

After these 3 experiments our free signup conversion rate went from 14.5% to 25%, a 72% improvement.

1) Including a pain point in our headline

When we launched the site our headline said Keeping Tabs on Your Diabetes Just Got A Lot Easier:

While this explained in very general terms a benefit of our product it didn’t hit on the real need that people had when they decided to keep a logbook to record their diabetes. Making your life easier is what almost every product promises.

People weren’t looking for our software because it was easier than what they currently do. They wanted better insight into their illness so they can stay as healthy as possible.

So we changed our message to Maintain Your Optimal Health by Keeping Tabs on Your Diabetes. We also highlighted the most important benefit “Optimal Health” with green.

This change resulted in a 31% increase in conversion after 1000 trials (our metric was signing up). Not bad at all.

2) Changing our signup button from Green to Red

Earlier this week I came across an article by Performable that explained how changing their call-to-action from green to red increased conversion by 21%.

I had to try it out so that day I set up an A/B test on our homepage call-to-action.

So far we’ve had 600 participants and our conversion rate has increased 34%.

We generally wait until 1000 trials but so far the results have been pretty significant.

We believe that it was so effective because we used green on many other parts of the landing page and the red just stands out so much more. It’s all about contrast.

3) Changing our button text from “Signup for Free” to “Get Started Now”

We also experimented with changing the button text on the call to action to from “Signup for Free” to “Get Started Now”. This one had a smaller effect, after 1000 trials our conversion rate improved by 7%.

The difference in this one is that “Get Started Now” is an easier sounding commitment than signing up. Signing up also has connotations with paying (our app is free).

Next up we’re going to try alternating the stock photo on the homepage from a male/female couple to a doctor and patient.

I’ve always found that information about VCs, angels and who the best lawyers are, was easy to find in Toronto. From attending various democamps, I’ve found plenty of experts on raising capital in Toronto. The angels here are very accessible and the StartupNorth team is very knowledgeable.

Raising capital is not the most immediate problem facing Toronto startups

One of the commenters on the post pointed out that you need to prove that your startup can make money before raising capital. I belive this is very true in Toronto and for the most part in the valley as well.

Similar to scaling the technical end, figuring out how to raise capital is a problem “you should be so lucky to have”. Because it means you’ve reached a point where you’ve found a business model and you need the cash to scale it.

The people getting funded on an unproven idea are much rarer than most people think. The only people who don’t have to go over the hurdles of establishing a scalable business model first are people who have had previous success – something that is far more common in the valley than Toronto.

The real problem that Toronto entrepreneurs face is learning how to get to a scalable business model – getting to the point where your business is realistically investable. Because once you reach that point the process of raising capital is much more straightforward.

While you can easily find experts in raising capital at Toronto startup events its harder to find vocal mentors/leaders who have gone out and built successful startups and had a good exit.

The Paypal Mafia Effect

Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake recently said in the NYTimes about building New York’s startup scene:

This is true for Toronto. We need a Paul Graham or Steve Blank – people who have built successful startups – to provide a base to our startup community. Another point raised at the Toronto Dev Lunch was that we need an incubator like YCombinator thats founded not by traditional investors or bureaucrats but by experianced vets.

Why? Because investors and beaucrats know the capital scene in and out and who the right person to talk to is. But they can’t teach you the street smarts needed to build a scalable startup.

With that base we can start pumping founders who are ready to build scalable startups. Once that happens capital will become more accessible in Toronto and more favourable to founders.

Steve Blank recently said in at his great keynote (42:00), the problem right now is not a lack of information. You can go online and find an answer to any startup question you have. What we need is a framework to take in the information and put that information to good use and I think it takes an battle tested entrepreneur to provide that framework whether its through an accelerator, mentorship, or just getting involved.

This sounds like a simple process but when done multiple times a day for more than one site, the calendar selector is not a very intuitive interface for this task.

So I created a bookmarklet that takes the 3 clicks and automates it to 1 using a javascript bookmarklet.

Drag this to your bookmark toolbar:

How do I use the bookmarklet?

1. Load up any google analytics page
2. Click the “Today’s Analytics” bookmark in the bookmark bar
3. The page will reload with the current date selected

The javascript source code can be found here. I can be easily extended to do any time range (7 days, 2 months etc).

CareLogger is a tool for diabetics to keep track of glucose levels, blood pressure and when they take medication.

We soft-launched about a week ago and so far 70 people have signed up which we’re really excited about.

The CareLogger Story

The idea came after me and my collaborator on this project, Nick Van Nuil from Dalmeny, discovered after speaking to a few people that there was a serious lack of tools online for diabetics. The one that came closest was an expensive windows-only application that had a very difficult to use UI.

So we spent 3 days creating a web application, with the idea of having a tool that will allow people with diabetes to track their illness from any web browser (and possibly a iPhone application in the future, if there’s demand).

The Plan

Right now we have no plans to charge money or display ads on the application. It was a great exercise in creating a minimum viable product as well as learning how to build a community and helping people manage their illness along the way.

CareLogger originally had the name HumaLogger that came from the name humalog, a name for insulin. But we decided to change it to CareLogger after finding out that humalog is trademarked.

We’d love to hear any feedback. You can try it out using our demo account (username: demo; password: demo) at http://carelogger.com/.

One of the most competitive (and seemingly profitable) industries that fits into this category is sports betting.

I ended up spending a few hours this morning checking out the various sites, search results and landing pages they used and it was interesting to see some of the most aggressive online marketers at work.

Here is a short analysis and some observations of what I found:

Landing Pages + SEM

Much like poker and mortgage sites, users are frequently in a ready-to-buy mindset and these sites employ a razor-like focus on getting the user signed up and betting as quickly as possible.

Many of these sites rely heavily on search engine marketing that direct users to sales-focused landing pages. Accord to this Adwords article, this type of advertising is only legal in certain countries.

bwin’s Landing Page

SportBet.com’s Landing Page

Betfair’s Landing Page

A few more landing pages: PaddyPower, LadBrokes, Coral and Bet365

Here is a very common themes in almost all of the SEM landing pages I came across:

• 1-2-3 Almost all of the landing pages used “1-2-3″ to sell the idea that its super-easy to signup; for example: “1 – Register, 2 – Make a Deposit, 3 – Start Betting”
• Imagery: All used imagery specific to the sport that was searched for, for example “football odds” brought me to a page with a soccer player who looks like they just won a game (I used Google UK, Google Canada has no gambling ads)
• No Sign-up Forms: Unlike mortgage/education landing pages, very few sports betting sites included signup forms on their landing page
• Call-to-actions: Instead of forms they all had giant “Join Now” call-to-action buttons linking to the forms
• Familiar Logos: All used logos that users are familiar with: major credit card logos, verisign, company partners like “FIBA”
• Engaging offer: most had an engaging offer, for example, free bonus money to start with or rewards

The average cost per click in Adwords is around $2-3, which is pretty standard for competitive keywords. Some keywords such as “sports spread betting” can cost up to $10+ a click.

Homepages

Organic search results linked to either 1) a landing page style homepage or 2) a section tailored to a specific sports.

These pages were frequently just large landing pages with the pure focus of getting the user to sign up. But some featured todays games and some articles.

Here were some commons themes among them:

• Dark designs, I was surprised by how many sites with black backgrounds I came across. It might be to mimic the appearance of the type of bar’s where you’d find sports bookies.
• On-page SEO: internal linking structures, titles, articles etc
• Imagery: a mix of happy sports players and sexy models
• Javascript Clocks: many sites had a live clock on every page, sports betters eagerly anticipate when games start and when they find out if they won or lost

The two that really stood out were SportsBooks and BoDog.

Affiliates + Content Sites

Sports betting seems to rely very heavily on affiliates to bring in traffic. The average payout among the top sites was around 25% of what the customer spends. Based on the number of spammy sites and affiliate landing pages I came across, I got the impression this is a hyper-competitive market.

One of the most common approaches by affiliates was to create content sites that followed this pattern:

1. Create a series targeted articles filled with keywords
2. Create a press release of the same content and get it index on sites like news.google.com and ezinearticles.com
3. Surround the articles with Join-now buttons for sports betting sites

For example: RedNose and CrunchSports

Conclusion

There are a few things startups in more conservative markets could learn from these hyper-sales focused sites.

Sports betting sites have the luxury of having visitors that are frequently ready to buy and each has the potential to bring in a lot of money. This means that quite a bit of marketing dollars can be spent on acquiring each customer.

But at the end of the day, I don’t want to give sports bookmakers too much credit given the addictive nature of gambling.

Losing Conversions from Indian Street Addresses

For the last few weeks at Learnhub I’ve been trying to optimize the conversion rate of our school application form. This form is lengthy compared to most and we required that potential students entered their home address.

As an experiment, we hooked up Google Analytics to track every time a validation error happened.

We were surprised to discovered that 20% of users failed to enter their street address properly and half of those users then exited the site. This was a big warning sign that our validations need improvement.

So we began to look into why this is happening in more detail.

We realized that our indian users were skipping the address not because they didn’t want to share it but because Indian addresses are really complicated.

In India, especially in smaller towns, street address’s are not as established as other parts of the world. If they did know it, it frequently looked like this: 83, LAXMI APPT., SEC-5, PLOT NO-27/8, ROHINI.

Asking someone to type that out is a usability nightmare.

From this data we now had a new starting point for improving conversions: by making the process of entering address easier or by making the field optional.

How Did We Track Validation Errors with Google Analytics?

In Google Analytics they have an awesome feature called event tracking that can be easily trigger by on-page javascript.

Our site was developed with Rails so when a field fails to validate, it automatically gets wrapped in a div.

So we wrote up a tiny script that:

1. scans the page for any divs with fieldWithErrors
2. grabs the ID of the form field
3. sends an event to Google Analytics with the label “Validation Error” and the value as the fields ID

The script (prototype):

With this data you can see see how many exited the form, what country they are from, validations per user, etc.

Fixing the Problem Fields

It may be beneficial to minimize the required fields to get that initial commitment.

Just like the old sales adage, if you can get the customer to say yes the first time it will be easier to get them to say yes later on for the bigger commitment.

Making fields a requirement is always a tough balance between hurting the forms usability and getting the information you want.

If you do decided to skip the tough questions early on, a process could be set up to get the needed information later on from something like a follow-up email or secondary form.

Either way it helps to have the analytics data to back it up those decisions.

dMix.ca has been redesigned

I have cleaned up this blogs design quite a bit and made it much more minimalistic. With a few ideas in mind:

• Consistent and readable typography
• Removed the sidebar so content is more of the main focus and less self-promotion
• Content is divided into 4 categories: UX, Rails, Marketing and Startups

The redesign was inspired after seeing Dustin Curtis’s awesome blog(azine), but with considerably less effort.

Contrastream has been shut down officially

It’s been about a year and a half since I wrote about why Contrastream never took off, it’s been the most popular post on this site plus writing it was a big reason why I created this blog in the first place.

Over the last 2 years since creating Contrastream I’ve seen quite a few other sites attempt to solve the same problem but nothing has really hit the nail on the head yet. There’s still a need, good indie music is hard to find, and hopefully someone can solve it (Last.fm and HypeMachine have come the closest).

I was hoping to come back to it as a side project but Integrate consumed most of my attention and I’ve recently joined a new startup (see below).

So today, I’ve decided to officially shut it down.

Now working at Learnhub

Last month I joined Savvica, a local startup in downtown Toronto. They are the creators of Learnhub and Jumbotests. I’m responsible for coordinating the User Experience (I plan on writing much more about UX soon) plus some Ruby development and online marketing.

It’s one of the few silicon valley style startups in Toronto and I’ve been having a great time working with the team.

The Scenario: Validate the username is unique as it’s typed into the forms text field

1) Live_validations controller and validation method

Create a controller to store your validation methods and add the appropriate routes.

2) Message partial

Create a partial that will handle the HTML that is returned for the ajax call.

In your form add an observe_field helper (JRails or Prototype required). This helper will observe the field every 0.5 seconds and pass the value of the text_field via params[:username] to the live_validation controller method.

I used accept.png and cross.png icons from Fam Fam.

Done.

JQuery + Rails Plugin Options

For straight javascript there are a few options, such as jQuery Validation and LiveValidations.com; these are great for basic validations (ex. email has a proper format) but they don’t have access to ActiveRecord.

There is also a rails plugin LiveValidations that hooks up to your existing validations and comes with a form builder for the AJAX, but after testing it: it doesn’t work with nested forms and with hundreds of lines of code it seemed like overkill.

I implemented a scheduling system into an app this month and I needed a calendar with monthly and weekly views.

There are over 80 repo’s on github for calendar + ruby. Calendars in rails are a solved problem, right? But oddly I couldn’t find one with a weekly view. All of them are either date pickers or monthly calendars.

So I decided to build my own and I’m happy to announce my first plugin: WeeklyBuilder [Github | Live Demo]

The builder creates a horizontal scrolling calendar, mapping events for each day of the week. The layout is fluid CSS and the hours can be switched from business hours to 24 hours.

The code was inspired by table_builder by Petrik de Heus which is a clean way to generate monthly calenders.

How to Use WeeklyBuilder

First install by downloading the source from github or via command line:
The weekly calendar builder:
The Next/Previous link helper:
The controller code:
Example events model:

The event model only requires 2 attributes: starts_at:datetime and ends_at:datetime to calculate width and position on the calendar. To simplify this for the user, I only ask the user for one datetime (starts_at) and how long it will take to complete, it then calculates ends_at based on those 2 attributes.

Github: http://github.com/dmix/weekly_builder/
Example: http://scheduler.integratehq.com/
Note: The demo uses table_builder for the monthly view and includes a few extra styles on the weekly. Not yet tested on IE6.

Update (03/06): Added a truncate_width method so that long event names are truncated in proportion to the width of the event, this is passed through the week block: |event, truncate|.

I was reading The Selfish Gene on my Macbook this weekend and since Kindle isn’t yet available in Canada, I have to work with what I have. Here is how to improve the experience (thanks to Andrew Burke for the heads up):

1. Download Adobe Reader or the lighter weight Skim PDF app
2. Open the PDF file, rotate view counter-clockwise (cmd+shift+- in Reader) and make it full screen (cmd+L)
3. Set mouse button to turn to the next page
4. Now the hard part: Turn Macbook sideways so the screen is vertical and can be held like a book
5. Bonus: Download Flux if you do a lot of reading at night, it adjusts the screens contrast based on the time of day

Macbooks have really wide screens that are awkward for ebooks when horizontal but great when vertical. The pages are much larger and fit better into the screen. Plus having the mouse button next to your hand to change pages is more ergonomic.

The drawbacks are that its heavy if your not resting it on a pillow and the glossy screen isn’t quite as readable as E-ink.