I’m quitting my day job as of March 31st. Today I was running out to lunch prior to a day packed with various uISV-centered activities and it struck me: crikey, this is really happening. I’m exhilarated and that weird not-scared-not-settled feeling one gets when one has run out the door in a hurry and is absolutely positive they have left something behind despite having verified the presence of cellphone, wallet, and day job ID card. (Oh, to no longer need the day job ID card.)
Let’s see, what is new and exciting:
Mini-sites: I met a new designer over the Internet who is helping me out with my stable of mini-sites, such as the (previously created) Easter bingo cards that I’m sure are going to be very popular over the next two weeks.
A/B tests: I have six A/B tests currently ongoing, which I think is my personal record for simultaneous A/B tests.
1) Landing page: Text heavy versus an image, a few sentences, and a signup button.
2) Shopping cart: A tweak of some microcopy (“Thank you for your interest in Bingo Card Creator!” -> “Get instant access to Bingo Card Creator!”)
3) Shopping cart: Addition of microcopy (“You don’t need an account to pay with your credit card though Paypal.”)
4) Online version dashboard: Addition of one-click access to top 10 word lists. Seems to be a crashing failure at increasing task completion, incidentally. I’ll be reverting this one in a moment.
5) Guest signup: Presence/absence of guest signup seems to have no effect whatsoever on sales. Good — I’m going to probably disable it, as they cost me support issues through the wazoo.
6) Button redesign. I found another talented designer recently, and decided to get a few dozen buttons drawn up to start testing versus my existing ones.
The old buttons:
The new buttons:
After seeing whether those new buttons are roughly comparable to the old ones or not, I had the designer make many, many variations on color and button texts. As always, I’m testing my way to victory, one 3~5% lift at a time.
Next Application: I have more or less mentally committed myself to my next application, although I should probably give it some more thought. Hint: it uses Twilio. Stay tuned to the same blog time, same blog channel for when I have something to announce.
Substantive Blog Posts: I’m working on a few long-form posts about what it is/was like running a business in my side time and how to do that without losing your sanity. If there are particular aspects of that you’d like to hear about, I’d love to hear them. Folks keep telling me to focus on time management techniques, so I guess I’ll be covering that, but I think they’re a little dry.
