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How To Prove You’re Not “Information Harvesting”

August 14, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

Just wanted to privately share some tactics to help you counter Google’s aversion to opt-ins in your landing page MVP. It’s hard enough getting a startup idea off the ground, to have to deal with arbitrary Google Adwords funny business.

If you are using the Launch Tomorrow process, email addresses have always been seen as “currency”. Emails are something valuable a prospect can give you to indicate that they really need the product you want to offer. Moreover, when selling online, you need email opt-ins to establish a relationship. In order to contact your prospect, you need an email address.

Google disagrees–kinda. One of the quickest ways to get on Google’s bad side is what they’ve dubbed “information harvesting”. How’s that for a “made up” problem?

Photo by Robert Wiedemann on Unsplash

Information harvesting means they’re unhappy you’re collecting private emails in exchange for “not enough” in their eyes. They’re chiding you for not providing a good user experience for the Adwords searcher. Yes, of course, but UX is not the point of a landing page collecting opt-ins, now, is it?

Specifically, here’s what Google says they don’t allow:

  • promotions that prompt users to initiate a purchase, download, or other commitment without first providing all relevant information and obtaining the user’s explicit consent
  • promotions that represent you, your products, or your services in a way that is not accurate, realistic, and truthful

With information harvesting, Google’s algorithms put you in the same bucket as late-nineties identity thieves. Long lost Nigerian prince relatives. And it’s up to you to prove (to a human employee of theirs) that you aren’t one, assuming you aren’t of course.

That’s what’s so uncomfortable about this policy. Personally, I try to be straight with myself and others as much as I can–all the time. So it feels unpleasant to be guilty until proven innocent. And tedious, to say the least. I do (unfortunately) know from my own experience, as well as other founders’ I’ve worked with.

In practice, though, the information harvester label will stop your landing page MVP in its tracks. Full stop.

Google suspends your entire Adwords account. Ouch.

If that happens, here are a few options:

  1. Drop Google, and move to other traffic sources for your landing page MVP
  2. Ask (without grovelling) GOOG to re-instate your account, and address each of their specific objections head on.
  3. Don’t gather emails, just sell a very low priced product–one which requires email for delivery. At least then you offset the cost of advertising in addition to getting emails.

With respect to dropping Google as a traffic source, it might not be the best source of customers for you in the long term. I’d argue it’s worth haggling with them anyway. You can get a lot of cheap, targeted market research about your value proposition from them–really quickly. They have traffic (ranked #1), and more importantly, they have more searchers than anyone else on the planet. If you want to find prospects searching for a solution to their problem, Google’s hard to beat.

Asking for Google to re-instate your account is a good, albeit slow, option. Typically, the actual changes they require aren’t that big, or at least there are simple workarounds.

For example, if you are asking for an opt-in, you need to be explicit, clear, and logical on exactly why you need their email address. Explain exactly what they should expect. If you are being up-front, transparent, and honest, you’re golden. That tends to help.

You also need to be clear WHERE IT SAYS ENTER EMAIL ADDRESS:

  • how often you will email them
  • how to unsubscribe, which google calls an “option to discontinue direct communications”
  • whether you will pass on user details to other companies.

There are also a few important components which must be on your Google-friendly landing page. This is true for both search and display traffic.

For example, if you have a form on the page, you must also include a privacy policy. Google wants you to be up front about your privacy policy, to openly declare what you’re doing with user data. You can hire a lawyer to draw one up for you, or you can just grab a subscription on iubenda [aff link]. It’s a privacy policy as a SaaS app. Select all of the tools you are actually using on your website, and get a lawyer approved privacy policy in 30 minutes. That’s an easy one. Usually, having a privacy policy increases conversions anyway. They’re possibly doing you a favor.

Other bits you need on your landing page include:

  • contact details
  • a phone number, especially, will help

You may need to clarify your business model to Google. You may also need to be transparent, and explain it to your Google sourced visitors. What’s free, what isn’t, and when they can expect to pay for something. Sometimes this can cause difficulties if you are a broker or middleman.

Ultimately, it will always come down to a judgement call by Google staff, so you will always need to comply to their requests. At the same time, they do accept that you’re running a business (or starting one). It’s the question of navigating that fine balance, so that everyone is happy.

The third way to get ditch the “information harvesting” label is quite simple…sell. Don’t just collect info. Sell at a loss if you need to. Sell an ebook for $1. Sell a higher priced service (think concierge or Wizard of Oz MVP) that addresses their problem. You may be able to get away with pre-selling the product.

At that point, you will need the user’s personal details to deliver the product. More importantly, you identify the people who are actively in the market for solutions and willing to pay for them. If you do sell (and collect sensitive information like bank or credit card details), you’ll need to use SSL. Grab a free one over here.

As you can see, you have a couple of options if you get this labelled slapped onto your account. Bing has started doing the same. Rumor has it Facebook is starting to “crack down” on information harvesting.

Want to know more about experimenting with landing pages? You’ll find my book Launch Tomorrow helpful. It goes into depth with everything else you need to think about, when putting up a landing page to test out demand for a new product.

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Filed Under: landing page MVP, startup, tools for founders

How to simplify a complicated process, so that even a 2.5 year old would understand it

October 2, 2019 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment

A few years ago, we had a significant challenge with our 2 year old daughter. Morning and evening routines were an uphill battle every day. Getting out the door to her childminder quickly enough to make my first meeting in the morning was often a drawn out battle of wills.

It was clear she wanted to collaborate and appease us as parents. But she didn’t understand what we expected of her. Moreover, her brain development still seemed to behind. The neocortex doesn’t kick into overdrive growth until later. She was also awash hormones, which is completely normal for this age. This caused the temper tantrums typical for a two year year old. They’re called “terrible twos” for a reason. We were also frustrated as parents, and we didn’t know how to help her. Fundamentally, this was an issue of her feeling overwhelmed. And unable to sort out what’s important from what isn’t.

In a professional context, visualization works really well to help stop overwhelm. Whether to map out a business process, plan a large scale software system, or figure out a business model, it helps to have everyone involved “brain dump” onto post-its. And then to organize them. This approach unleashes a lot of latent creativity. Plus it helps front-load difficult discussions. You find out really quickly what the major challenges are with a new initiative.

Example of Eventstorm output

How it all started

One Saturday afternoon, I was watching her learn to draw on a coffee table. I had the idea to draw out her morning and evening routines. First and foremost, I wanted to do it with her, not to her. As she was already drawing and playing around, I felt a little more comfortable drawing my chicken-scratch cartoons. Drawing was never a personal strength of mine.

So I pitched it to her as a fun project we can do together. I pulled out some bigger post-its and a Sharpie, and sat down at the coffee table with her.

First, I suggested that we brainstorm what she does in the morning. As she was coming up with specific actions, like eating breakfast, I would sketch out a symbol of that particular activity. A cartoon visualization.

As she wasn’t able to read, images brought home the message. They eliminated the cognitive load for her. She was excited to see me draw things she named on the fly. It isn’t that common of a sight to be honest. As an output of each suggestion, we drew a cartoon on a green wide post it. And pasted it on our coffee table.

Once we had a handful of these, I suggested a few others which she might have missed-for approval. I also suggested a few which were deliberately incorrect, just to make sure she was paying attention.

After this, we moved to a “converging phase” of the workshop. I suggested that she take the post its and put them in order on the wall. We had to do it together in practice, but the key was that I gave her the final say in the actual order. I was holding the relevant two post-its, and asking questions like do you “eat breakfast” before you “descend the stairs”? Doing this multiple times, we came up with a reverse chronologically ordered list of post-its that reflected her morning routine.

Morning and evening routine prototype

At that moment, she seemed to step back and view the whole process. And she was absolutely beaming, proud of both us for doing it together. But also happy that she finally understood what her parents were on about every morning. She felt less overwhelmed.

So she felt confident that she will now be able to achieve what is expected of her. Because she understood what is expected of her for the first time in her life!

Wrap up and implementation

We then did the same thing thing with her evening routine on dark blue post its. And ordered it the other way, finishing with her in bed and falling asleep.

When thinking about it, I realized the grouping was off. Some of the activities are performed on the ground floor of our house. And some on the first floor, where her bedroom and the bathroom was.

So I unwrapped a brown paper roll, ripped off two pieces about a meter long, and sat down again with my daughter. We put the ground floor post-its on one brown paper square. And the first floor post-its on the other.

“Upstairs process” mapped out, with modifications/corrections from my daughter

Finally, we hung up the ground floor post its in our dining room, and the first floor post its in her bedroom. So in the end, she had a detailed map of her daily routines, organized chronologically and physically near the place where she would actually do them.

What happened in practice

My wife and I were shocked at how effective this was. The daily tantrums nearly disappeared completely overnight. If there was push-back from her, it lasted 15 seconds not 15-45 minutes as it did in the past.

The fastest way to help her calm down, when she looked like she was about to blow up, was to walk her over to the post its. Then ask her where we were at that moment in the process. She would point to the relevant one. The emotions would calm down, as this required some cognitive load from her. And we could continue on with the rest of the routine that morning or evening.

About a year later, as I was putting her to bed, she said

“Daddy, that picture there is wrong” pointing at the one where she brushes her teeth.

“Oh really, what do you mean?” I asked.

“By the time I am brushing my teeth, I’m already wearing my PJs, not a dress”.

From a dress to pajamas

She was right. The next weekend, I drew out a version of the same post-it with her avatar dressed in a pajamas.

Her brain development had caught up. She understood what this map meant. She had full ownership of the process, because she’d been involved from the beginning. And most importantly, she could call out specific ideas for improvement.

Lessons learned

This experience made me reflect how powerful the principle of visualization actually is:

  • It can help make sense of initially overwhelming complexity. Put everything “out there” on a wall, rather than micromanage your memory.
  • It helps participants feel empowered and in control of what is happening. Improve motivation to implement, once decisions are made.
  • It helps everyone involved to view a situation more objectively. Both big picture and smaller details exist together. “what should i draw on your plate when you eat breakfast?”
  • In the case of my daughter, the increased clarity helped with emotional regulation. While (hopefully) not necessary in a professional environment, team “feel good” is a welcome side effect.
  • Cartoons and symbols don’t require the ability to read or write, in order for them to work.

Visualizing waste and complexity is a very powerful way to help get a grip on it. Clearly, the visual component speaks to us at a primordial level. Cavemen drew images. Medieval religious propaganda was based on paintings and images. This stuff is powerful.

If you want to know where to start with visualization and other tools, check out my short video course on the Hero Canvas.

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Filed Under: case study, stories, tools for founders, vizualization Tagged With: eventstorm, lean value stream map, personal story

How to create an actionable client profile

August 28, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow 5 Comments

daniel day lewis launch tomorrow

Daniel Day Lewis, method acting maestro

He’s the first man to ever win three Oscars. Daniel Day Lewis, that is.

For the entire filming of My Left Foot, he didn’t leave his wheelchair, sound coherent, or even feed himself. For Last of the Mohicans he became a survivalist. He lived off the land. For In the Name of the Father, he lived in a prison cell. He starved himself. He asked the cast to insult and abuse him.

When playing Abraham Lincoln, he even signed his texts “A.”

Daniel’s style of acting, called method acting, expects him to become his character. To live in their skin. Which is a potent skill to have as a marketer.

Why?

[Read more…]

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Filed Under: experiments, find people, tools for founders

Rising Above The Noise With A Story

November 5, 2015 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment

Imagine you lived in Paleolithic times. Your name is Blug. You live in a cave. You’ve used fire for years, to cook game that you’ve caught or to prepare the hide in order to turn it into leather. In any case, you know it’s hot. You know fire burns.

fireOne day, as you’re sitting in your cave with your friend Geg, the fire lights a dry log lying nearby. The fire spreads quickly. The pathway to the cave entry is blocked by this burning log.

Geg suggests you have three options:

  1. wait
  2. try putting it out
  3. jump over the flames

Initially, you decide to try putting it out. You throw a pelt on the flame. It looks like it dies down, until…wait…the fur on the other side of the pelt catches. The flame grows even higher.

It’s getting harder and harder to breathe because of the smoke. You’ve moved everything else away from the fire in order to prevent it from spreading. If you wait any longer, you’ll start choking because of the smoke.

You are left with one option. The only way out is over the rising flames. Having suffered 2nd degree burns as a child, Geg’s terror increases as the hypnotically dancing flames get larger.

You’ve noticed that waving your hand over a campfire feels warm, but if you move it quickly it doesn’t burn. Based on this observation, you decide to take two hops and lunge forward over the conflagration. As you fly through the air, you feel the heat all around you. You raise your knees up high, minimize contact. The jump itself lasts a split second. You land on the other side of the fire, intentionally falling forwards to avoid any contact. You get up immediately, a bit bruised but thrilled you got over the fire without getting hurt.

You yell out to Geg, “Jump over it! I’m fine! Just hold up your knees and jump as far as you can.”
Unconvinced, he counters, “What do you mean? I’ll get burned again.”
You respond, “As long as you go over it quickly, you wont get hurt.”

Geg sucks in his breath. One, two, and clears the fire lifting up his knees, just like you. He lands cleanly on the other side, grinning from ear to ear.

“You were absolutely right,” he proclaims, as you emerge from the mouth of the cave. “You saved my life.”

Afterwards, when Geg tells friends the story of how you discovered this new fact about fire, they repeat it to their friends. The story travels far and wide. Other cavepeople enjoy hearing about your tale of courage, learning about this particular aspect of fire in the process. Before long, you become well-known as the One Who Discovered Fire Jumping. It’s how you’re introduced, whenever you meet anyone new. This story of struggle, this moment when you almost lost your life, enhanced the rest of your life and that of your fellow cavemen significantly.

Fire Jumping 101, or Why Stories Matter

Storytelling, like many things which are a part of our everyday lives, has been around with us since prehistoric times. It was a key survival skill for human beings, humans as a race. The fact that we could share information in the form of stories meant that knowledge traveled among people. Thanks to stories we learned vicariously, not only from personal experience. Stories made it possible to build and spread knowledge.

Imagine that your product idea gives your customers the power to jump over fires, something they never believed they could do or knew was possible. Or probably, you have some other main benefit in mind. Packaging it into a story will make it easy to explain what it is and how it works, even if it sounds incredible at first. A good yarn helps your product find a context.

Powerful stories amplify the effectiveness of product teams more than anything else. This is true at the level of the company’s story, at the level of the product’s story, and especially at the level of the offer. Good stories build on one another. For example, the tagline makes sense when you know the company’s story. Both communicate the values of the company as well as product messaging. Most importantly, it helps the product find or create a community for which it’s appropriate.

Start at the level of the prospect’s story. There are five main benefits you get from focusing on the user or the product story.

1. Stories Drive Buyer Action

Stories help to organize all that’s very meaningful. As a result, they drive action. The type of action that both you and your customer want. At the super-early stages, in fact, the main action that we’re looking for is the prospect’s intention to buy.

The story communicates what you’re trying to do for your target audience. A good story gives you the same effect of visualizing or simulating the struggle and how the product solves the problem.

In Made To Stick, Chip and Dan Heath cite a study where this effect of simulating the event, by visualizing it or by hearing it in a story, gives you two-thirds of the benefit of doing something e.g., shooting a basketball.

The story itself is transferring is the experience of having done what the thing is without necessarily actually doing it. It shares the skills needed to overcome a problem. The story helps resolve the protagonist’s struggle, the user’s struggle. It is a way to plant the belief that this product will solve their problem. “A belief,” Elly Roselle observes, “is not an idea held by the mind. Rather it is an idea that holds the mind.” You want your prospect to believe that your product will help them.

In direct marketing circles, copywriters consider emotion to be the key reason people buy a product. Marketing copy, for example on a sales letter, is just stored emotional energy. Stories are an extremely powerful way to trigger or deliver the emotion needed to convince the reader to buy.

Essentially, we’re talking about the persuasive stories that the prospect wants to hear. They draw the prospect in, make them want to find out more, and eventually convince them to buy. The prospect wants to be certain that you understand their story of struggle. Only then will they consider how your product fits into their own story and can end their struggle. The great thing about stories is that they allow everyone to avoid the trap of just following mindless problem solving recipes.

2. Talk With Prospects In Their Language

Quite often people are looking for a quick fix, a quick way out, without really addressing the full issue. Without really understanding it. If you’re using some type of mindless format, technique or tip, or something, quite often that’s not sufficiently infused with motivation for you to do anything, or enough motivation for the buyer of these products to do things.

For the last 20 years or so, the amount of information has been doubling annually. That’s overwhelming and continues to be more so all the time. If you look at the number of emails or ads that you get now on a daily basis versus 10 years ago, you can see how much that actually affects you. In addition to email, there’s many other types of communications which didn’t even exist back then. Things basically like chat, text, messaging, Snapchat, or whatever else.

Most people don’t actually want any more information. They’re overwhelmed with information. When they’re trying to solve a problem, what they actually want is the belief that they’re capable of overcoming it.

The thing is, if rational facts and information were so convincing, there wouldn’t be any smoking, obesity, or other “diseases of Western civilization”. Most people who smoke are aware of what the implications are in terms of lung cancer. But, obviously, it doesn’t affect their actions. Whereas a powerful story’s message can be a catalyst, it can inspire them to introduce change.

People want some wisdom or insight into their problem. They want to be inspired to act, to do something with it. They want a better understanding of what’s going on around them, the context. They also want empathy. They want to sense that others understand who they are. Good stories give you all of these things, while dry information doesn’t. Stories make problems much easier to understand on a deep level.

3. Focus Your Team on Business Impact

You want to avoid the trap of executing meaningless to do list items. If you really understand the full story, you understand why you are chasing after a goal. Thanks to a clear story, your team intuitively understands what the end user’s or buyer’s context.

With stories, you can communicate the important details about a product without stating all the details. This refers to both how a user sees things and how your product team understands that user.

For example, if the user’s story is clear, then it’s easier for the supposedly socially awkward software developers to figure out the relevant details needed to address the user’s problem. Even if you are missing certain details, the team can fill in what’s missing.

Good stories operate on many levels: emotional, intellectual, visceral, social. By telling a good story, you have the flexibility to adjust what gets emphasized for particular audiences.

With clearly communicated priorities, it’s much easier for you to focus on the business impact of your work. The following are good ways to visually summarize the impact you want to achieve: Gojko Adzic’s Impact Map tool and Ash Maruya’s Lean Canvas.

4. Easy-Peasy Chasm Crossing

A story that is easy to understand helps you, even at the pre-launch stage, to “cross the chasm”. Geoffrey Moore pointed out, in his fantastic series of books on high tech marketing, that high-growth tech companies face a number of significant audience changes in a compressed time window. Unlike traditional companies which tend to stick to one large group of people and try to scale that way, tech startups often start out by serving the “early tech adopter” community. It’s dangerous to generalize from that audience to a more mainstream audience. In fact, this complete change in audience is an important aspect of the “chasm”. Promising products that don’t make it across the chasm stall when they could be experiencing exponential growth.

In this context, a simple story, which a five-year-old could understand, is one that will be easier to scale up. Because it’s understood by everyone, from early adopters to your grand aunt, it’s very memorable. A clear, memorable, and spreadable story that everyone understands is easier to adopt. The leap from the early guys to the mass market is simplified.

A great example of this is Apple’s byline when they were launching the iPod. Although mp3 players had existed for years, the iPod was “your whole music collection in your pocket”. That story that drove the design specs, manufacturing, and embedded software requirements. This byline also explained to users, even if they were completely non-technical, exactly what the thing did. Unlike most mp3 player manufacturers at the time, Apple didn’t stress how many megabytes or gigabyte of RAM the thing had, or other technical characteristics. Apple just drew people’s attention to the benefit mentioned above. It’s a benefit which summarized the whole point of having an MP3 player, and made having an mp3 player attractive to the target audience.

5. Rallying the Troops

The next reason why you want to have a very clear story, at the user level and when scaling up, is that it sets your organizational tone. If the whole organization focuses on solving the user’s problem, it motivates everyone. Not just the CEO. Ultimately, the customer is the primary source of revenue and profits in a business.

This way everyone understands exactly what needs to be solved. Everyone understands how to make tradeoffs. Decisions are easier when the CEO is not required to be there physically. The team would have a common language for discussing requirements based on the story. This would result in the sharing of essential information needed to act quickly.

Organizational culture just clicks into place, as you’re building out your product later. By helping to act, what this
essentially means is that, quite often, the audience becomes engaged with it. They become more involved because you’re talking about their story. They feel drawn to what it is you’re doing.

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Filed Under: proof, stories, tools for founders

Optimizing Your Product Idea By Building a Sales Funnel First

October 22, 2015 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment

When your prospects first hear of your product, your message will make or break your whole business. That moment is crucial. You will repeat it many times. You will continue repeating it as long as you have prospects. The more successful you are at nailing that first impression, the easier it will be to ramp up afterwards. Exponentially easier. You will literally see it in the numbers at each stage of the funnel, as people drop off and lose interest.

In fact, invention guru Doug Hall did rigorous market research across his client base, where he looked at thousands of new product launches. His results confirm the importance of the product idea, “the quality of the idea or the offer is 2.2x more often the source of product failure than the marketing plan, and 1.5x more often the source than product [technical] performance.” Ouch.

Once your prospect has a clear picture of what you are selling and whether they care, which will typically take a few seconds, then they’ll know whether they want to continue engaging with you or not.

If you nail this core message, and your market drools as it hears about your product. Everything else will be much easier:

  • Prospects will clamor for your product.
  • Your product launch has a much greater chance of going viral via referrals.
  • With good revenues, it’s much easier to build a solid business that supports your early adopters.
  • The cost of acquiring new customers will be proportionately lower, if you have a good offer.

A clear, sexy, and differentiated offer that solves a real problem affects all downstream metrics in your business. And you go from startup to successful business owner fast. Very fast.

In mature businesses, the simple way to benchmark business success is profits. If you are just starting out, you don’t have profits yet. Instead, you can observe the flow of your prospects towards a sale.

As you build out the funnel, you can test and optimize your product idea
“Begin with the end in mind.” –Steven Covey

Therein lies enormous power.

In a for-profit business, your ultimate goal is to make money. If you start with that end in mind, you immediately identify all of the reasons why you aren’t selling yet. In fact, this helps you rapidly identify all of the key things you need to do.

By learning how to reach your ideal prospects, learning enough about them to convince them to sign up for more information, and ideally even pre-selling the product in a simplified form, you will be certain you’re building the right product when you actually start building anything.

funnel

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How To Prove You’re Not “Information Harvesting”

August 14, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

Just wanted to privately share some tactics to help you counter Google’s aversion to opt-ins in your landing page MVP. It’s hard enough getting a startup idea off the ground, to have to deal with arbitrary Google Adwords funny business.

If you are using the Launch Tomorrow process, email addresses have always been seen as “currency”. Emails are something valuable a prospect can give you to indicate that they really need the product you want to offer. Moreover, when selling online, you need email opt-ins to establish a relationship. In order to contact your prospect, you need an email address.

Google disagrees–kinda. One of the quickest ways to get on Google’s bad side is what they’ve dubbed “information harvesting”. How’s that for a “made up” problem?

Photo by Robert Wiedemann on Unsplash

Information harvesting means they’re unhappy you’re collecting private emails in exchange for “not enough” in their eyes. They’re chiding you for not providing a good user experience for the Adwords searcher. Yes, of course, but UX is not the point of a landing page collecting opt-ins, now, is it?

Specifically, here’s what Google says they don’t allow:

  • promotions that prompt users to initiate a purchase, download, or other commitment without first providing all relevant information and obtaining the user’s explicit consent
  • promotions that represent you, your products, or your services in a way that is not accurate, realistic, and truthful

With information harvesting, Google’s algorithms put you in the same bucket as late-nineties identity thieves. Long lost Nigerian prince relatives. And it’s up to you to prove (to a human employee of theirs) that you aren’t one, assuming you aren’t of course.

That’s what’s so uncomfortable about this policy. Personally, I try to be straight with myself and others as much as I can–all the time. So it feels unpleasant to be guilty until proven innocent. And tedious, to say the least. I do (unfortunately) know from my own experience, as well as other founders’ I’ve worked with.

In practice, though, the information harvester label will stop your landing page MVP in its tracks. Full stop.

Google suspends your entire Adwords account. Ouch.

If that happens, here are a few options:

  1. Drop Google, and move to other traffic sources for your landing page MVP
  2. Ask (without grovelling) GOOG to re-instate your account, and address each of their specific objections head on.
  3. Don’t gather emails, just sell a very low priced product–one which requires email for delivery. At least then you offset the cost of advertising in addition to getting emails.

With respect to dropping Google as a traffic source, it might not be the best source of customers for you in the long term. I’d argue it’s worth haggling with them anyway. You can get a lot of cheap, targeted market research about your value proposition from them–really quickly. They have traffic (ranked #1), and more importantly, they have more searchers than anyone else on the planet. If you want to find prospects searching for a solution to their problem, Google’s hard to beat.

Asking for Google to re-instate your account is a good, albeit slow, option. Typically, the actual changes they require aren’t that big, or at least there are simple workarounds.

For example, if you are asking for an opt-in, you need to be explicit, clear, and logical on exactly why you need their email address. Explain exactly what they should expect. If you are being up-front, transparent, and honest, you’re golden. That tends to help.

You also need to be clear WHERE IT SAYS ENTER EMAIL ADDRESS:

  • how often you will email them
  • how to unsubscribe, which google calls an “option to discontinue direct communications”
  • whether you will pass on user details to other companies.

There are also a few important components which must be on your Google-friendly landing page. This is true for both search and display traffic.

For example, if you have a form on the page, you must also include a privacy policy. Google wants you to be up front about your privacy policy, to openly declare what you’re doing with user data. You can hire a lawyer to draw one up for you, or you can just grab a subscription on iubenda [aff link]. It’s a privacy policy as a SaaS app. Select all of the tools you are actually using on your website, and get a lawyer approved privacy policy in 30 minutes. That’s an easy one. Usually, having a privacy policy increases conversions anyway. They’re possibly doing you a favor.

Other bits you need on your landing page include:

  • contact details
  • a phone number, especially, will help

You may need to clarify your business model to Google. You may also need to be transparent, and explain it to your Google sourced visitors. What’s free, what isn’t, and when they can expect to pay for something. Sometimes this can cause difficulties if you are a broker or middleman.

Ultimately, it will always come down to a judgement call by Google staff, so you will always need to comply to their requests. At the same time, they do accept that you’re running a business (or starting one). It’s the question of navigating that fine balance, so that everyone is happy.

The third way to get ditch the “information harvesting” label is quite simple…sell. Don’t just collect info. Sell at a loss if you need to. Sell an ebook for $1. Sell a higher priced service (think concierge or Wizard of Oz MVP) that addresses their problem. You may be able to get away with pre-selling the product.

At that point, you will need the user’s personal details to deliver the product. More importantly, you identify the people who are actively in the market for solutions and willing to pay for them. If you do sell (and collect sensitive information like bank or credit card details), you’ll need to use SSL. Grab a free one over here.

As you can see, you have a couple of options if you get this labelled slapped onto your account. Bing has started doing the same. Rumor has it Facebook is starting to “crack down” on information harvesting.

Want to know more about experimenting with landing pages? You’ll find my book Launch Tomorrow helpful. It goes into depth with everything else you need to think about, when putting up a landing page to test out demand for a new product.

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Filed Under: landing page MVP, startup, tools for founders

How to simplify a complicated process, so that even a 2.5 year old would understand it

October 2, 2019 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment

A few years ago, we had a significant challenge with our 2 year old daughter. Morning and evening routines were an uphill battle every day. Getting out the door to her childminder quickly enough to make my first meeting in the morning was often a drawn out battle of wills.

It was clear she wanted to collaborate and appease us as parents. But she didn’t understand what we expected of her. Moreover, her brain development still seemed to behind. The neocortex doesn’t kick into overdrive growth until later. She was also awash hormones, which is completely normal for this age. This caused the temper tantrums typical for a two year year old. They’re called “terrible twos” for a reason. We were also frustrated as parents, and we didn’t know how to help her. Fundamentally, this was an issue of her feeling overwhelmed. And unable to sort out what’s important from what isn’t.

In a professional context, visualization works really well to help stop overwhelm. Whether to map out a business process, plan a large scale software system, or figure out a business model, it helps to have everyone involved “brain dump” onto post-its. And then to organize them. This approach unleashes a lot of latent creativity. Plus it helps front-load difficult discussions. You find out really quickly what the major challenges are with a new initiative.

Example of Eventstorm output

How it all started

One Saturday afternoon, I was watching her learn to draw on a coffee table. I had the idea to draw out her morning and evening routines. First and foremost, I wanted to do it with her, not to her. As she was already drawing and playing around, I felt a little more comfortable drawing my chicken-scratch cartoons. Drawing was never a personal strength of mine.

So I pitched it to her as a fun project we can do together. I pulled out some bigger post-its and a Sharpie, and sat down at the coffee table with her.

First, I suggested that we brainstorm what she does in the morning. As she was coming up with specific actions, like eating breakfast, I would sketch out a symbol of that particular activity. A cartoon visualization.

As she wasn’t able to read, images brought home the message. They eliminated the cognitive load for her. She was excited to see me draw things she named on the fly. It isn’t that common of a sight to be honest. As an output of each suggestion, we drew a cartoon on a green wide post it. And pasted it on our coffee table.

Once we had a handful of these, I suggested a few others which she might have missed-for approval. I also suggested a few which were deliberately incorrect, just to make sure she was paying attention.

After this, we moved to a “converging phase” of the workshop. I suggested that she take the post its and put them in order on the wall. We had to do it together in practice, but the key was that I gave her the final say in the actual order. I was holding the relevant two post-its, and asking questions like do you “eat breakfast” before you “descend the stairs”? Doing this multiple times, we came up with a reverse chronologically ordered list of post-its that reflected her morning routine.

Morning and evening routine prototype

At that moment, she seemed to step back and view the whole process. And she was absolutely beaming, proud of both us for doing it together. But also happy that she finally understood what her parents were on about every morning. She felt less overwhelmed.

So she felt confident that she will now be able to achieve what is expected of her. Because she understood what is expected of her for the first time in her life!

Wrap up and implementation

We then did the same thing thing with her evening routine on dark blue post its. And ordered it the other way, finishing with her in bed and falling asleep.

When thinking about it, I realized the grouping was off. Some of the activities are performed on the ground floor of our house. And some on the first floor, where her bedroom and the bathroom was.

So I unwrapped a brown paper roll, ripped off two pieces about a meter long, and sat down again with my daughter. We put the ground floor post-its on one brown paper square. And the first floor post-its on the other.

“Upstairs process” mapped out, with modifications/corrections from my daughter

Finally, we hung up the ground floor post its in our dining room, and the first floor post its in her bedroom. So in the end, she had a detailed map of her daily routines, organized chronologically and physically near the place where she would actually do them.

What happened in practice

My wife and I were shocked at how effective this was. The daily tantrums nearly disappeared completely overnight. If there was push-back from her, it lasted 15 seconds not 15-45 minutes as it did in the past.

The fastest way to help her calm down, when she looked like she was about to blow up, was to walk her over to the post its. Then ask her where we were at that moment in the process. She would point to the relevant one. The emotions would calm down, as this required some cognitive load from her. And we could continue on with the rest of the routine that morning or evening.

About a year later, as I was putting her to bed, she said

“Daddy, that picture there is wrong” pointing at the one where she brushes her teeth.

“Oh really, what do you mean?” I asked.

“By the time I am brushing my teeth, I’m already wearing my PJs, not a dress”.

From a dress to pajamas

She was right. The next weekend, I drew out a version of the same post-it with her avatar dressed in a pajamas.

Her brain development had caught up. She understood what this map meant. She had full ownership of the process, because she’d been involved from the beginning. And most importantly, she could call out specific ideas for improvement.

Lessons learned

This experience made me reflect how powerful the principle of visualization actually is:

  • It can help make sense of initially overwhelming complexity. Put everything “out there” on a wall, rather than micromanage your memory.
  • It helps participants feel empowered and in control of what is happening. Improve motivation to implement, once decisions are made.
  • It helps everyone involved to view a situation more objectively. Both big picture and smaller details exist together. “what should i draw on your plate when you eat breakfast?”
  • In the case of my daughter, the increased clarity helped with emotional regulation. While (hopefully) not necessary in a professional environment, team “feel good” is a welcome side effect.
  • Cartoons and symbols don’t require the ability to read or write, in order for them to work.

Visualizing waste and complexity is a very powerful way to help get a grip on it. Clearly, the visual component speaks to us at a primordial level. Cavemen drew images. Medieval religious propaganda was based on paintings and images. This stuff is powerful.

If you want to know where to start with visualization and other tools, check out my short video course on the Hero Canvas.

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Filed Under: case study, stories, tools for founders, vizualization Tagged With: eventstorm, lean value stream map, personal story

How to create an actionable client profile

August 28, 2016 by LaunchTomorrow 5 Comments

daniel day lewis launch tomorrow

Daniel Day Lewis, method acting maestro

He’s the first man to ever win three Oscars. Daniel Day Lewis, that is.

For the entire filming of My Left Foot, he didn’t leave his wheelchair, sound coherent, or even feed himself. For Last of the Mohicans he became a survivalist. He lived off the land. For In the Name of the Father, he lived in a prison cell. He starved himself. He asked the cast to insult and abuse him.

When playing Abraham Lincoln, he even signed his texts “A.”

Daniel’s style of acting, called method acting, expects him to become his character. To live in their skin. Which is a potent skill to have as a marketer.

Why?

[Read more…]

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Filed Under: experiments, find people, tools for founders

Rising Above The Noise With A Story

November 5, 2015 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment

Imagine you lived in Paleolithic times. Your name is Blug. You live in a cave. You’ve used fire for years, to cook game that you’ve caught or to prepare the hide in order to turn it into leather. In any case, you know it’s hot. You know fire burns.

fireOne day, as you’re sitting in your cave with your friend Geg, the fire lights a dry log lying nearby. The fire spreads quickly. The pathway to the cave entry is blocked by this burning log.

Geg suggests you have three options:

  1. wait
  2. try putting it out
  3. jump over the flames

Initially, you decide to try putting it out. You throw a pelt on the flame. It looks like it dies down, until…wait…the fur on the other side of the pelt catches. The flame grows even higher.

It’s getting harder and harder to breathe because of the smoke. You’ve moved everything else away from the fire in order to prevent it from spreading. If you wait any longer, you’ll start choking because of the smoke.

You are left with one option. The only way out is over the rising flames. Having suffered 2nd degree burns as a child, Geg’s terror increases as the hypnotically dancing flames get larger.

You’ve noticed that waving your hand over a campfire feels warm, but if you move it quickly it doesn’t burn. Based on this observation, you decide to take two hops and lunge forward over the conflagration. As you fly through the air, you feel the heat all around you. You raise your knees up high, minimize contact. The jump itself lasts a split second. You land on the other side of the fire, intentionally falling forwards to avoid any contact. You get up immediately, a bit bruised but thrilled you got over the fire without getting hurt.

You yell out to Geg, “Jump over it! I’m fine! Just hold up your knees and jump as far as you can.”
Unconvinced, he counters, “What do you mean? I’ll get burned again.”
You respond, “As long as you go over it quickly, you wont get hurt.”

Geg sucks in his breath. One, two, and clears the fire lifting up his knees, just like you. He lands cleanly on the other side, grinning from ear to ear.

“You were absolutely right,” he proclaims, as you emerge from the mouth of the cave. “You saved my life.”

Afterwards, when Geg tells friends the story of how you discovered this new fact about fire, they repeat it to their friends. The story travels far and wide. Other cavepeople enjoy hearing about your tale of courage, learning about this particular aspect of fire in the process. Before long, you become well-known as the One Who Discovered Fire Jumping. It’s how you’re introduced, whenever you meet anyone new. This story of struggle, this moment when you almost lost your life, enhanced the rest of your life and that of your fellow cavemen significantly.

Fire Jumping 101, or Why Stories Matter

Storytelling, like many things which are a part of our everyday lives, has been around with us since prehistoric times. It was a key survival skill for human beings, humans as a race. The fact that we could share information in the form of stories meant that knowledge traveled among people. Thanks to stories we learned vicariously, not only from personal experience. Stories made it possible to build and spread knowledge.

Imagine that your product idea gives your customers the power to jump over fires, something they never believed they could do or knew was possible. Or probably, you have some other main benefit in mind. Packaging it into a story will make it easy to explain what it is and how it works, even if it sounds incredible at first. A good yarn helps your product find a context.

Powerful stories amplify the effectiveness of product teams more than anything else. This is true at the level of the company’s story, at the level of the product’s story, and especially at the level of the offer. Good stories build on one another. For example, the tagline makes sense when you know the company’s story. Both communicate the values of the company as well as product messaging. Most importantly, it helps the product find or create a community for which it’s appropriate.

Start at the level of the prospect’s story. There are five main benefits you get from focusing on the user or the product story.

1. Stories Drive Buyer Action

Stories help to organize all that’s very meaningful. As a result, they drive action. The type of action that both you and your customer want. At the super-early stages, in fact, the main action that we’re looking for is the prospect’s intention to buy.

The story communicates what you’re trying to do for your target audience. A good story gives you the same effect of visualizing or simulating the struggle and how the product solves the problem.

In Made To Stick, Chip and Dan Heath cite a study where this effect of simulating the event, by visualizing it or by hearing it in a story, gives you two-thirds of the benefit of doing something e.g., shooting a basketball.

The story itself is transferring is the experience of having done what the thing is without necessarily actually doing it. It shares the skills needed to overcome a problem. The story helps resolve the protagonist’s struggle, the user’s struggle. It is a way to plant the belief that this product will solve their problem. “A belief,” Elly Roselle observes, “is not an idea held by the mind. Rather it is an idea that holds the mind.” You want your prospect to believe that your product will help them.

In direct marketing circles, copywriters consider emotion to be the key reason people buy a product. Marketing copy, for example on a sales letter, is just stored emotional energy. Stories are an extremely powerful way to trigger or deliver the emotion needed to convince the reader to buy.

Essentially, we’re talking about the persuasive stories that the prospect wants to hear. They draw the prospect in, make them want to find out more, and eventually convince them to buy. The prospect wants to be certain that you understand their story of struggle. Only then will they consider how your product fits into their own story and can end their struggle. The great thing about stories is that they allow everyone to avoid the trap of just following mindless problem solving recipes.

2. Talk With Prospects In Their Language

Quite often people are looking for a quick fix, a quick way out, without really addressing the full issue. Without really understanding it. If you’re using some type of mindless format, technique or tip, or something, quite often that’s not sufficiently infused with motivation for you to do anything, or enough motivation for the buyer of these products to do things.

For the last 20 years or so, the amount of information has been doubling annually. That’s overwhelming and continues to be more so all the time. If you look at the number of emails or ads that you get now on a daily basis versus 10 years ago, you can see how much that actually affects you. In addition to email, there’s many other types of communications which didn’t even exist back then. Things basically like chat, text, messaging, Snapchat, or whatever else.

Most people don’t actually want any more information. They’re overwhelmed with information. When they’re trying to solve a problem, what they actually want is the belief that they’re capable of overcoming it.

The thing is, if rational facts and information were so convincing, there wouldn’t be any smoking, obesity, or other “diseases of Western civilization”. Most people who smoke are aware of what the implications are in terms of lung cancer. But, obviously, it doesn’t affect their actions. Whereas a powerful story’s message can be a catalyst, it can inspire them to introduce change.

People want some wisdom or insight into their problem. They want to be inspired to act, to do something with it. They want a better understanding of what’s going on around them, the context. They also want empathy. They want to sense that others understand who they are. Good stories give you all of these things, while dry information doesn’t. Stories make problems much easier to understand on a deep level.

3. Focus Your Team on Business Impact

You want to avoid the trap of executing meaningless to do list items. If you really understand the full story, you understand why you are chasing after a goal. Thanks to a clear story, your team intuitively understands what the end user’s or buyer’s context.

With stories, you can communicate the important details about a product without stating all the details. This refers to both how a user sees things and how your product team understands that user.

For example, if the user’s story is clear, then it’s easier for the supposedly socially awkward software developers to figure out the relevant details needed to address the user’s problem. Even if you are missing certain details, the team can fill in what’s missing.

Good stories operate on many levels: emotional, intellectual, visceral, social. By telling a good story, you have the flexibility to adjust what gets emphasized for particular audiences.

With clearly communicated priorities, it’s much easier for you to focus on the business impact of your work. The following are good ways to visually summarize the impact you want to achieve: Gojko Adzic’s Impact Map tool and Ash Maruya’s Lean Canvas.

4. Easy-Peasy Chasm Crossing

A story that is easy to understand helps you, even at the pre-launch stage, to “cross the chasm”. Geoffrey Moore pointed out, in his fantastic series of books on high tech marketing, that high-growth tech companies face a number of significant audience changes in a compressed time window. Unlike traditional companies which tend to stick to one large group of people and try to scale that way, tech startups often start out by serving the “early tech adopter” community. It’s dangerous to generalize from that audience to a more mainstream audience. In fact, this complete change in audience is an important aspect of the “chasm”. Promising products that don’t make it across the chasm stall when they could be experiencing exponential growth.

In this context, a simple story, which a five-year-old could understand, is one that will be easier to scale up. Because it’s understood by everyone, from early adopters to your grand aunt, it’s very memorable. A clear, memorable, and spreadable story that everyone understands is easier to adopt. The leap from the early guys to the mass market is simplified.

A great example of this is Apple’s byline when they were launching the iPod. Although mp3 players had existed for years, the iPod was “your whole music collection in your pocket”. That story that drove the design specs, manufacturing, and embedded software requirements. This byline also explained to users, even if they were completely non-technical, exactly what the thing did. Unlike most mp3 player manufacturers at the time, Apple didn’t stress how many megabytes or gigabyte of RAM the thing had, or other technical characteristics. Apple just drew people’s attention to the benefit mentioned above. It’s a benefit which summarized the whole point of having an MP3 player, and made having an mp3 player attractive to the target audience.

5. Rallying the Troops

The next reason why you want to have a very clear story, at the user level and when scaling up, is that it sets your organizational tone. If the whole organization focuses on solving the user’s problem, it motivates everyone. Not just the CEO. Ultimately, the customer is the primary source of revenue and profits in a business.

This way everyone understands exactly what needs to be solved. Everyone understands how to make tradeoffs. Decisions are easier when the CEO is not required to be there physically. The team would have a common language for discussing requirements based on the story. This would result in the sharing of essential information needed to act quickly.

Organizational culture just clicks into place, as you’re building out your product later. By helping to act, what this
essentially means is that, quite often, the audience becomes engaged with it. They become more involved because you’re talking about their story. They feel drawn to what it is you’re doing.

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Filed Under: proof, stories, tools for founders

Optimizing Your Product Idea By Building a Sales Funnel First

October 22, 2015 by LaunchTomorrow Leave a Comment

When your prospects first hear of your product, your message will make or break your whole business. That moment is crucial. You will repeat it many times. You will continue repeating it as long as you have prospects. The more successful you are at nailing that first impression, the easier it will be to ramp up afterwards. Exponentially easier. You will literally see it in the numbers at each stage of the funnel, as people drop off and lose interest.

In fact, invention guru Doug Hall did rigorous market research across his client base, where he looked at thousands of new product launches. His results confirm the importance of the product idea, “the quality of the idea or the offer is 2.2x more often the source of product failure than the marketing plan, and 1.5x more often the source than product [technical] performance.” Ouch.

Once your prospect has a clear picture of what you are selling and whether they care, which will typically take a few seconds, then they’ll know whether they want to continue engaging with you or not.

If you nail this core message, and your market drools as it hears about your product. Everything else will be much easier:

  • Prospects will clamor for your product.
  • Your product launch has a much greater chance of going viral via referrals.
  • With good revenues, it’s much easier to build a solid business that supports your early adopters.
  • The cost of acquiring new customers will be proportionately lower, if you have a good offer.

A clear, sexy, and differentiated offer that solves a real problem affects all downstream metrics in your business. And you go from startup to successful business owner fast. Very fast.

In mature businesses, the simple way to benchmark business success is profits. If you are just starting out, you don’t have profits yet. Instead, you can observe the flow of your prospects towards a sale.

As you build out the funnel, you can test and optimize your product idea
“Begin with the end in mind.” –Steven Covey

Therein lies enormous power.

In a for-profit business, your ultimate goal is to make money. If you start with that end in mind, you immediately identify all of the reasons why you aren’t selling yet. In fact, this helps you rapidly identify all of the key things you need to do.

By learning how to reach your ideal prospects, learning enough about them to convince them to sign up for more information, and ideally even pre-selling the product in a simplified form, you will be certain you’re building the right product when you actually start building anything.

funnel

In the image, the top funnels symbolize each traffic source you use. The big funnel then grabs the output of those funnels, and sells them on the product.

The trap many tech startup founders fall into is creating the product, only to discover that they don’t have a sales funnel. They don’t know how to reach prospects systematically. They don’t know what prospects actually need. Building the right product means hit-or-miss.

If you know you want to build a business, by trying to sell (or at least get email addresses from interested prospects) from the start, you learn about the business you are entering. You are finding out where all of the warts are immediately, before building anything.

You are immediately forced to see the world how it is, based on the patterns in the data you gather, not how you think it should be.

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Filed Under: extreme product launch, marketing, startup, tools for founders

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