You indirectly mentioned this in your talk: You have users enter their CC details whens starting a free trial on AR instead of when the free trial ends.

I've heard Rob Walling recommend this approach on his podcast, and noticed you do it for AR, but I've never seen you write about it. I would love to hear just a little more about it and any A/B data you've collected on it.

On the one hand it obviously decreases the number of users passing through the sign up stage of the funnel, but on the other hand it's obvious that the customers who do sign up convert a lot more.

Thanks!

Excellent advice as always. One question: When talking about marketing for internet businesses, I don't remember you mentioning branding much, if at all, mostly direct response marketing stuff. Is this by choice? Have you got an opinion about branding for internet startups - eg how many resources they should devote to it compared to direct response marketing?

Most of my businesses are aggressively unbrandable (with the debatable exception of myself personally). Branding strikes me as not really playing to my strengths and not being maximally compatible with the sort of time and resource constraints most small businesses / startups are operating under. (If I were in a confrontational mood I'd also describe it as "A great way to spend a lot of money while avoiding any responsibility to actually produce meaningful business results.")

I suspected something like this :) I come from a technical background too, but I think that not thinking in branding terms is very often a big weakness of us technical founders - one of the reasons why inferior products often have the upper hand. I'm also trying to make a business out of this realization, but I'm not there yet and for now I'll just try to sow the seed of doubt here.

By the by, I also think that a lot of what you suggest for direct response marketing also has branding effects - just think about educating people by email for free - so the two things aren't necessarily in contrast. And I don't think that there would be much to debate about the value of your personal brand here (meaning no offence - if you don't like the word brand, just substitute "reputation" to it!).