JoshLedgard

At KickoffLabs we used them to handle a bunch of routing on behalf of our hosted customers.

The timing was less than ideal for sure.

However they arranged a good support system with the folks at Fly.io. We’ve already transitioned new customers to it and they are helping to migrate existing sites and certs next week.

I think it’s a risk you just have to take, but we learned a lesson that for things that are dependancies for your business it’s good to have a couple of alternatives lined up or working side by side. :)

We don't actually force anything. We could, of course, check to see if you liked us on Facebook... but even that's a loose check since it's easy to unlike something anyway.

The goal is to help others improve their launches with the email course and for us to build a larger audience... through Facebook, Twitter, and Email.

Josh Ledgard Co-Founder - KickoffLabs

It's good feedback that we should highlight the free course and encouragement we give you a chance to opt into.

http://www.landingpages107.com specifically. It's a 10 part email course with 9 worksheets you can use to improve your conversion rates. There are some subtle ads in that email course for our service... but we get great feedback on the content of the course.

When it comes to viral gains. It doesn't really matter much if you don't have many followers... sometimes it just takes one. :)

This is the sort of contest a lot of our customers have been asking to run lately and we're experimenting by running one ourselves so we can improve our own customer experience.

To me, what made what he was doing appealing was that he wasn't directly soliciting people. He made the arrow and the sign. He wasn't harassing anyone in line. I think that makes all the difference.

Agreed.

I like the idea of getting feedback on competitors apps. :)

That turned out really cool!

I'm not saying it couldn't be improved. Just saying that what matters is if, overall, our conversion rate is better with it.

Then, if it is, we can spend more time, money, and effort on the video. If we had spent $6,000 to learn that having an explainer video doesn't help... I'd be pissed. But if I see an improvement over the next week then I can invest more.

The real verdict of the video success has much more to do with analytics than individual opinions.

Of course, since we just posted it, we won't have good results of our A/B test (against a static image slideshow) for a week or so.

Once I signed up for PowToon the pricing for our plan was $57 a month... which gives you 20 video exports.

I thought about music... but after an hour trying to find a good match I gave up and figured I could add music later.

Optional for the post content. You can produce the content and have it hosted on Youtube for well under the $200... which was the point of the tip.

Yes, in our case, we also pay Vimeo for video hosting so we can further customize the experience.

Voicebunny lets you select gender and add notes. They also seem to have a process that reads your notes and looks for the ideal talent.

Our first recording came back a little too whimsical. So we asked for a revision to have it more profesional sounding and got it for $16 more dollars. Still within our $200 budget.

Then you got past the premise. :)

Beyond the education we were trying to go for a little bit of the corny/infomercial feeling.

I called this out before... Vimeo could be considered optional. Youtube can be configured as well for hosting the video. Or you could self host. The post was more about the production.

Thanks. Fixed the blog and now re-exporting the video.

No - That should be called out as optional.

But the commenters here have added information on creating a better youtube experience.

Thanks for the tip. We still like the stats and stuff we get from Vimeo... but if that really works other people could save more $$.

And to repost my reply... Thanks for the comment. We love posting things that we've learned that could help out our customers.

The thing I couldn't figure out with Youtube was how to stop the post-roll "ads" for "related videos" that took the user out of our context.

And, no, removing it from the public index didn't effect the post-roll recommendations.

But, on the other hand, even if we'd paid a service to do it we still would have had to help a lot with the script. Which was one of the most costly (time consuming) parts.

About 8 hours. It was basically two half days to get it to what you see there.

So, to your point, our time was probably the most costly part. :)

When we first launched we had a screen recording with a voice over.

Our problem with that is that, as a startup, our UI was changing every couple of months. The premise/goal doesn't change for the user... but we keep making it better. So that video got old too quick. And editing screen recordings every couple of months got tiring.

We are also looking to do some how-to videos with voice-bunny instead of our voices though. It ends up sounding much better.

Mom and pop don't like hunting for links. Watch normal people browse the web. They try to click on anything they think will give them more information about what they want.

Everyone tests different titles. It's part of marketing.

I'll freely admit to:

1. Writing a best practices post on a timely subject to grab more attention. "How to create a good landing page" wouldn't do nearly as well.

2. Testing headlines to see what drives the most clicks. Although this one was my first try on Hacker News.

I'll bet over the next 6 months Apple changes the headlines on their landing pages as well.

Thanks for understanding the point of the post is to educate folks on how they could learn from best practices. They still had to execute on their marketing. If you compare their landing pages to the Samsung, Microsoft, or Nokia ones... it's no comparison.

That's awesome. I'm going to have to use that tool more often. :)

I don't buy that. I agree it doesn't have to be that good, but you still have to execute on basics... which is what the post is trying to highlight.

Think of all the poor, unfed, startup founders and their children that could have been funded instead of having this video produced... when... when will someone think of the children.

I do fully support the local design community. In fact our site and product design comes mainly from local resources. However... most of them simply don't like or want to take on small projects like this.

Sure, if I have to spend $500+ dollars they can tackle larger things that I would never farm out. But the GOOD local designers are generally too busy for the small stuff. And the ones that have time simply aren't as good.

Also - for smaller projects like this - the small entrepreneur (me) has a limited amount of time. Why should we spend it calling around to see if someone has a couple of hours to do this. I've tried. The people I trust are busy... so contest away.

You'll have to let me know what the problem is with spec work when it's the designers choice to enter or not enter a contest. I didn't hold a gun to anyones head and say "draw pixel monkey!"

I posted a request. Told them I'd select a winner. Ran the contest. Worked with the designers. Selected a winner and paid. I even was upfront enough to eliminate designers that were never going to win so they stopped wasting their time.