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As you have hopefully read in our story, Sustainability Entrepreneur came about because of an immediate need to fix Planet Earth. We’ve got a really strong hunch that there are thousands of people out there that have great ideas, but they’re working full-time and they’re frustrated that they can’t make progress or pursue their ideas further. We can help.
There is a serious pain point here, but we have to prove it. Before we put more resources and time into this project and deliver an incredible service to our subscribers, we need to complete our validation experiment.
Validating the service
Between July 1st and August 31st, 2019, we are targeting 500 sign-ups as our main metric of how much demand there is for this service. If we get the 500 signups, we will prove that there is a decent crowd of people out there who need and want our help.
But how committed are they going to be? How much help do they need? Will they want to pay for a service like this? This all affects what level of service we can provide
This shows the performance of the landing page after 1 month with only Linkedin promotion from Daniel- so 58 sign ups. 10% of the target.
The next step is to carry out more linkedin promotion via the advisors and mentors.
Other validation metrics
The second metric is our six-week email series. We want to see people subscribing to this and using it as an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment. We can see the open rates, we can see whether people read the email or simply closed it, and we can see what links people have clicked on. All of this information will help us draw a good picture of how interesting people think the service is, and how determined they are to use it to solve their problem.
This shows open and click rates for the first few emails. Which gives us a good idea of the commitment and interest from those signing up.
The following stats are for email #1...
We can also see which links sign ups are clicking on the most. Who is the most engaged and therefore committed and how long people are reading emails for.
Calls to action
Within the email series are some calls to action that will also help us gain more information on how to shape the service. The first of those CTAs is a survey. By simply filling out the survey and providing their thoughts and feedback, these people will be giving us a really good indication of how committed they will be. The survey asks some really interesting questions - interesting for those filling them out, and interesting for us to learn more about our subscribers.
Some of the questions include:
- On a scale of 1-10, how dedicated are you to building your business in the next few years?
- How much would you pay to be able to achieve it?
From these two questions alone, we can see the potential commitment levels and also get an idea about pricing for the service.
The webinar
After the survey, the next call to action will be the Idea Generation Webinar. We are very curious to see how many people will take part in that and want to really dig deep and start coming up with amazing ideas.
Location, location, location
Once we’ve got more subscribers, we will be able to look at the location trends and see the pockets or regions where most of the people are. If there are areas with a lot of subscribers, we will be able to host paid face-to-face workshops. Interest in these events will show us how many people are genuinely interested in being involved and are actually willing to spend some money to make things happen.
This is the last of the call to actions because it comes at the end of the six-week email series. People will have been on the journey and seen what sort of content is going to be made available to them. They can then make the decision to put their money where their mouth is.
Putting all of that information together, we will then be able to make a really good judgement call about whether this service is going to succeed or not, how much resources (employees, mentors, advisors etc) to put in, whether it solves a pain point, and what the pricing structure should be.
I have a major hunch this service will help people have a huge impact- and I am hopeful the metrics will back this up!
Thank for reading!
Have you joined up to our "6 Week Welcome Email Series" yet? This takes you incrementally through setting a vision and generating ideas. Click the button below.
Mark Shayler and Daniel O'Connor are hosting a webinar on how to validate your ideas. We will take you through it, help you validate ideas and have a Q&A. More info and register below.
