What I learned from being on LifeHacker 9 days after starting work on ShirtFitFinder.com

The biggest thing that happened last month was that my site-in-a-week experiment, Shirt Fit Finder, ended up on LifeHacker two days after it launched.  This was a far better reaction than I had ever hoped for, and much bigger than I knew how to handle.  In fact, the site went down for at least 6 hours while it was featured.  I was asleep in China, and my friend who submitted it couldn’t get a hold of me because I had my phone set up to ignore calls from the US in the middle of the night, precisely so that people don’t wake me up accidentally.  Unfortunately, this time was on purpose…

Regardless of the reason, I learned a lot from the experience of finally getting a lot of attention focused on something I had worked on.  Here’s the good and the bad of how I handled it, and also some financial results:

Results

• Upgrade of server to bigger plan on Linode: -$16
• Money from affiliate links on SFF: $0 (Really!  Experimenting to see if affiliate links would be a better way to make money was actually the original purpose of the site.)
• New customers for Bespoke Row: 5 (which was actually more orders, because some of them ordered a second time after getting their shirts)

Good

• Quickly responded to comments online – e.g. on Reddit where people thought I should make the connection to Bespoke Row more clear, so I changed the site in a few hours.
• Created a new channel to my main business – The visitors to Bespoke Row who came from SFF generally converted at a better rate than other visitors, which I think is because SF basically acts as a demonstration of why they need a custom shirt before they come over.  There are also now a lot more links to SFF than to Bespoke Row on the web, too, so I hope it will continue to work this way for a long time.
• Learned that affiliate links are also a hard way to make a living – The fact that I had thousands of people on my site and not a single affiliate sale pretty much answered my question about how many visitors would be needed to make money from affiliate links to clothing sites.

Bad

• No Analytics – I built the site so quickly that I didn’t even add in any analytics packages.  This is so easy to do, and I missed it.  Now I don’t even know how much traffic I actually got.
• No way for people to sign up for future news and updates – I have a feeling I lost a lot of potential sales here.  A lot of people visited the site, but I have no way to identify them or to follow up because I didn’t have a newsletter signup or a link to a Twitter account that people could follow, etc.  Even though part of the appeal of SFF was that you don’t need to sign up, you can just use it, some percentage of people would probably have wanted to leave feedback or hear about changes.  I will definitely remember this for any future projects.  I added a Twitter account pretty quickly, but all it could do was message people who had shared SFF or the LifeHacker link.  That’s a bit different than having a group of followers that would see any future tweets.
• No way for people to share – Traffic died off pretty quickly after about a week.  It was old news on LifeHacker, and people didn’t think to come back.  In combination with not having any way to remind them (see above), I also didn’t have any way for the current traffic to lead to more traffic.  In retrospect, SFF results would be great to share with family or friends right before people go shopping for Christmas gifts.  Even beyond that, just giving people the opportunity to tell their friends on Twitter and Facebook might have led to traffic that built over time instead of falling off.
• No way to grow the database – There are a lot of ways to get no results on Shirt Fit Finder – for example, if you’re taller than the tallest shirt we knew about, we don’t have anything to show you.  This happened to many people.  There were also a lot of people who didn’t own any of the shirts listed, so they couldn’t even search for something better.  A week later, I added a way for people to search with their own shirts and add different brands to the database, but it was a little too late.
• No way to know about the site going down during the day – I didn’t leave any way for people to wake me up during the night, and the notices from my host were all sent to my personal email so my partner in Boston didn’t even realize what was happening.  I fixed this by changing my linode account to be associated with a shared Bespoke Row email address instead.

Overall, though, Shirt Fit Finder was a huge success.  I will definitely be doing more side projects in the future to see what other ideas can gain traction.  They may or may not be related to Bespoke Row, but because I’m thinking quite a lot about the problems of choice and knowledge when making fashion decisions these days, they probably will be.

Copywriting connundrums

Xavi and I just released a new feature on Bespoke Row that helps people design their shirts by asking them a few questions about themselves and then generating recommendations based on their answers of shirts that we can make.  It’s called the ‘Style Advisor’.

Surprisingly, this simple name has already given me a bunch of trouble.  Why?  Because advisor can also be spelled as ‘adviser’, and sometimes it gets underlined as being misspelled in certain text editors.  I didn’t know which to pick.

Eventually, I went with advisor because there are 70 million Google results for ‘advisor’ and only 26 million for ‘adviser’.  So, was it the right choice?  Who knows?  We’ll see if I get any comments about it being misspelled from customers.

How Bespoke Row is running a new-product survey

We’ve talked for a long time about adding new products at Bespoke Row, so yesterday I started that process with a survey about custom pants.  We’re conducting an experiment using our Startup Mastermind spreadsheet – if we can get 5 positive responses with less than $100 of advertising, we’ll start selling pants.

To begin with, we thought about what the most important piece of information someone can share with us is.  Perhaps obviously, we realized that it’s their email address.  With just that, they’ve shown that they’re a potential customer by letting us know how to contact them when we’re ready to sell.

Therefore, we decided to make our initial survey one question long.  We start out on a page that tells people what we’re doing and asks for their email address.  If they submit it, we add them to our custom pants mailing list on MailChimp.

Initial Survey Page - just email address

Then, we take them to a second page that has all our secondary questions – what materials/options are they looking for, whether they think the benefit will be better fit or better style, etc.  None of these are required, but if the user answers them, they’d help us make a better product.  The answers from these questions are collected in a Google Spreadsheet Form that gives us the ability to analyze the answers easily using Google’s tools.

Details Survey Second

I think the best part of this survey is that we randomly choose an amount of money in our potential price range and ask them “Would you be willing to pay $X for a pair of custom pants?”  This is far better than the last survey I tried, when I asked this as a multiple choice question and every person naturally chose the lowest listed price.

Finally, we take the user to a thank-you page and encourage them to try a custom shirt while they’re waiting.

All together, this was pretty easy to set up (about 5 hours) and uses MailChimp and Google Docs, which are both great free tools that do their job better than we could in-house.

Startup Mastermind

This year, my friend Simon has been working a Mastermind game for the Blackberry, and when I went back to Boston I got a chance to try it out.  It looks great, but I was actually much more impressed at how good he’d become at the game after thousands of testing sessions.  I took quite a few guesses to finish games with 4 and 5 secret numbers, whereas he has been able to finish games with 9 slots in only 13 guesses!

When I asked Simon what his secret was, he told me that you have to make each line teach you something you can be sure about.  You can’t just guess randomly, and you can’t try to learn too much at once.  When Simon plays, each line is an experiment; he knows what every possible result will mean to him before he submits it.

Not only is this great advice for a game of Mastermind, it’s great advice for a startup.  Lean startups are all about feedback, but it’s very easy to start looking at your Google Analytics reports without knowing what they’re really telling you and how you should react to them.  Now, I have a spreadsheet on which I write down any hypotheses that I have, a test that will allow me to test the hypothesis, and what the next step is if the test confirms or denies my hypothesis.  The actual column names are ‘Hypothesis’, ‘Test Idea’, ‘Required Results to Confirm’, ‘Required Results to Disprove’, ‘Action if Confirmed’, ‘Action if Disproved’, ‘Real Test’, ‘Results’ (these last two are filled in over time as we run the tests).

I’ve only just started doing this, so I only have one completed test so far, but it’s a good reminder to think critically about what exactly I learn from any action I take, and I hope it will help Bespoke Row improve quickly in the future.  If I get enough comments here, I’ll write a follow up in three months or so on how it works out.

Bespoke Row Blog

I recently started a new blog for Bespoke Row – [updated 2010/09/08] Now it’s hosted at http://www.bespokerow.com/blog.

Production, Step 1

Judy and I have spent a bunch of time over the last few months learning as much as we can about tailoring and working with product suppliers.  We finally agreed to work together with a particular tailor and factory yesterday.  I think they’ll be able to provide us with high quality clothing at reasonable prices and have a fast turn-around.

It took us a long time to find a supplier that would interested in working with us, partially because we aren’t really sure how much volume we can provide at first.  We found out pretty quickly that when you aren’t able to promise really large volume immediately, a lot of places won’t even want your business because it’s not worth the hassle.

To overcome this, we first talked to a lot of tailors to find some that would be interested, but what I think was most important at the end was that we went from just telling them what we wanted – e.g. low prices, high quality, consistent stock, to explaining a little bit more about what our vision was and why we were starting at low volumes, but that we’d like to grow together quickly.  The one we decided to go with agreed to help us out quite a bit at first to try and get Bespoke Row going.  Moreover, if we need to get things other than just clothes produced (shirt stays, labels, etc.), he can help us get in touch with people who can make them.  Just like any other relationship, it seems that working with suppliers can’t just be them giving us what we want; we need to treat it a bit more like a team venture so that they’re rooting for our success as well.