Are credit card trials impacting trial success? We switched over to requiring credit cards to start a trial on Feb 18.

My thinking was: If people enter a credit card, they’re more invested and more likely to take the time to actually… try the app, at least once. (We know from past tests that people who make any time entries at all are much more likely to become paying customers.)

It’s too early to say for sure, but the trend? Looking goooooood.

I’m comparing the recent new trial period with the last period when we were doing explicit marketing (the Freelancember advent calendar), which brought in tirekickers.

So, sales copy.

The thing about sales copy is that it works best when it makes your reader sit up and cry, “Hang on… they’re talking to ME!” And the best way to create that personal resonance is through what I call crispy writing — specific, concrete, vivid details.

Not ‘save time’ but ‘spend less on ‘just one more little thing’ change emails.’

Not just ‘earn more’ but ‘understand your true hourly rate by tracking and including your non-billable time spent on sales and communication’.

I’ve written a lot about landing pages and sales copy:

• 6 critical mistakes you’re making with your landing page
• How I increased conversion 2.4x with better copywriting — specifically about the current Noko sales copy

Bottom line: You can’t get that “That’s For Me!” feeling without also creating an equal and opposite “That’s NOT For Me!” feeling in people for whom those crispy details do not resonate.

You can’t make plans for your sales copy without making plans for your customers.

Here’s where I’m at with this:

Our current sales copy is currently tailored for consulting agencies.

Consulting agencies and larger internal departments are our Best Customers…

1. They stay longer
2. They pay more
3. They’re easy to work with wrt support

Because sales copy can’t serve two masters, I chose to totally de-emphasize our solo plan, for freelancers/individual consultants.

Freelancers are the easiest customers to acquire, but they churn faster. In part because they have no inertia to fight (e.g. retraining their teams etc), in part because they go out of business pretty often, or — and this is distressingly common! — they just decide to wave their hands and do package quotes without tracking their time at all, simply… trusting… that they’re not ripping themselves off. (Sidebar: This is bad business!!)

Easy to acquire is good. Churn is bad. Result: it’s a wash.

According to Growth Math, we should ignore solo customers.

But solo customers also tend to spread Noko — they leave, sure, but pretty often they get hired into teams, and advocate for Noko internally, or they tell their friends. We’ve heard this a lot, direct from the source.

And that’s a major part of my Growth Theory for the future:

More solo plans = more long-term growth, despite short-term churn.

My other Growth Theory is capitalizing on my assets.

In case you didn’t know, I write about bootstrapping business over at Stacking the Bricks. People know me. People trust me.

Those people, like you (like me!!), would get a lot of benefit out of tracking their time.

So I plan to “borrow audiences” — from myself, and from my fellow entrepreneurs and bootstrappers and startups, like me, wherever I can find them.

Our current sales copy won’t work resonate with the entrepreneur audience.

Nor will it resonate with internal teams, our other Best Customer.

And it will not quite resonate with freelancers, being as it is focused on groups of people.

That’s my dilemma, my challenge, and the huge potential rewards.

The tentative way I’m going to solve it? Funnels.

Yeah, I can customize and segment the landing page using RightMessage — and I plan to!

Before that, though, I’m going to create super-targeted ebombs, micro-sites, and tools. Those will lead naturally to super-targeted landing pages and sales pitches that will resonate hard for them.

Rather than attract everyone to the same place, I’m going to try to attract different folks to different places.

1. Solo folks? Freelancing + consulting advice, resources, and tools; one of them is gonna be a rate calculator that doesn’t suck, ha!
2. Consulting agency folks? Similar to the solo folks, but bigger picture, because managing a team and keeping your pipeline usefully full is totally different from filling up your own calendar
3. Entrepreneur folks? Growth talk, biz strategy, inside dirt, goals, tools (hi—you’re soaking in it!)
4. Internal teams? Honestly, don’t have a plan for these folks yet; I treasure them, but am not quite sure how they end up at our door (aside from being spread by Solo folks who get hired)

It’s easy enough to lay this strategy out in a blog post. It’s much harder to execute.

Plus, of course, when people share, they’ll naturally share the main landing page — we’ll still have to accommodate that. It’s not without challenges.

That’s why I’ll be blogging about it, every step of the way.

PS: In case you’re wondering… I’ve spent 43 minutes today, so far, writing up plans like this, and I know that because I’ve been using my trusty Noko timer 😂 I’m going to set up a goal to do 45 min to an hour a day of this meta-work to be sure I’m on the right track.

What’s the plan for this week?

I already wrote a new trial account today (email sales) and reviewed our support inbox & stats.

Next I’m going to work on freshening up our blog — by loading up, tweaking, and scheduling a backlog of new ebombs written by a freelance writer I hired.

Then I’m going to examine our existing email course assets with an eye towards freshening those up.

And I’m gonna sketch out a plan for some tailored landing pages and sales cophy. More on that in my next post.

What makes a good lifecycle email?

• interesting, exciting, or compelling
• tailored to the customer’s needs & wants
• tailored to the customer’s situation/level/status
• supportive
• a single, well-defined call to action
• a distinct style/voice (as appropriate)
• timely, urgent — not manipulatively so, but just enough of a deadline to get the reader to look, think, and take action (even if that means closing their trial)

Exciting and compelling can be ‘positive’ such as valuable insight or new features — or ‘negative’ such as “don’t lose access to Noko!”

This email is weak sauce.

• “Noko trial period expiring” is just 😱 extremely terrible as a subject line
• there’s no exciting or compelling reason to open, it doesn’t even have a # of days
• “expiring” sounds like bad milk
• it doesn’t make a case for using & staying whatsoever
• it doesn’t talk about what I’ll gain or lose
• it just announces facts on a plate — date, link
• it’s kinda “me me me”
• the CTA is small and weak
• while it’s fine to offer assistance, this is not really the ideal time? the extra text pulls away from the CTA

The “Noko universe?” I mean, sure, it’s fine to talk about the Nokoverse, but… not now.

My trial hasn’t ended yet, so I’m hoping there’s another email or two. These emails come from our app itself rather than via customer.io so they have a different sender name and there’s no easy/graphical way for me to dig into them…

I forgot there’s also a second weekly report email: an individual activity report, for me alone. I’m the account owner so I received both. An individual user would only receive this one.

Good: The embedded pulse!! And the fact that it exists. There’s a CTA to update/edit the time…

Bad:

• the CTA to review & edit is at the very bottom
• most of the criticisms for the group weekly report apply here as well
• on blank days, there’s no CTA for adding time

Idea: an opportunity to reflect on the week.

Good: the weekly activity email is automatic! People love reports and our reporting is pretty powerful.

Bad…

• “Weekly activity” is a weakass subject line
• the email is ridiculously long, even tho we’re only 3 people and haven’t been logging a full 8 hours a day
• clipping is super bad!
• there’s no click thru target
• if they have more than 3 people logging a small amount, this is absurdly overwrought
• there’s no excitement
• no CTA to add missing time
• no CTA to see a more detailed report

This needs to be more active and forceful, with a summary of data rather than 8 million individual lines, and we need to have something to do like click to view and explore the full report, learn about reporting etc, etc.

Observations:

• “Welcome to Noko” as a subject line is just… so boring and static
• this email has waaaaayyy too many things going on
• E_TOO_MANY_BOXES
• we should focus on getting people to track their first entry or import data, even, rather than repeat details they probably didn’t forget because they JUST did it…
• far too many things to click…
• honestly I don’t like the photos
• don’t think it focuses enough on the trial aspect
• doesn’t help the person DO anything
• the tone is kinda smarmy

I would really love to ask a question here, or in the app onboarding, to learn why they want to track their time (if they bill or don’t bill etc). To then serve up relevant content. Because the rest of the onboarding is mostly about billing.

I hate customer.io. I had forgotten just how much I hate customer.io. It brags “THIS IS LIVE” without giving me any way to edit it not-live. It’s opaque, the text is tiny, the text is GREY ON WHITE, the interface is cluttered beyond belief,,,

It’s astonishing to me that none of these tools let me view all the emails at once so I can get a feel for the corpus of content we are sending people!

Anyway there are like 6 interwoven campaigns because when we set it up (foolishly), customer.io did not have a way to jump around with internal logic so it’s just a giant clusterfuck. FML.

Just Founder Things:

We’ve added almost $500 MRR but I don’t know precisely how.

Some of it is converted trials — that’s easy to see. But, like, the MRR shot up overnight… while the number of paying accounts didn’t increase.

I have questions:

• Did a small account cancel and a large account convert simultaneously?
• Did somebody add a bunch of users to their existing account?
• Did free accounts or expired trials emerge from the dead?
• (worst thought) Is there an error?

You’d think we’d already have a way to see this in our backend. You’d be wrong! But we shall be adding it soon.

I’m always saying, “Running a business means learning to live at 80% done, forever.” And it’s true. The work is never done.

Also… calculating stats — like churn, and even revenue — is an art, not a science.

I’ve been laid up the last couple days with a glutening (ughhhh fucking gluten), but Thomas is working on embedding Noko reports into web pages (for the Growth Stacking project itself!!) and the rest of the team is working on changing up our trial.

A long, long time ago, we switched to a 14-day trial with no credit card required, and changed up our onboarding email sequence accordingly. It was supposed to be an experiment… theoretically, removing the CC requirement should increase our conversion to trial, and the shorter 14-day limit should have spurred people to act… but then I got sick and never checked back in, and neither did anyone else.

The experiment didn’t work.

We’re going back to a 30-day, CC-required trial.

No, not because we want to rely on people forgetting to cancel. We have always and will always send ample notification.

We’re going back to CC trials because of human nature.

The key to converting trials is creating success.

You can’t create success if people don’t take 5 minutes to actually try the software out.

Yep, you can work on your onboarding interface, and your supportive lifecycle emails. We did work a lot on those.

But a lot of our trials end up not making even one single time entry.

It’s not because they don’t care or aren’t really in the market.

We’re all busy, and have so many conflicting demands on our time, that a deadline (with teeth) is sometimes the only way to get us to take any action, even towards something we want.

I know I’m not the only one who’s immediately signed up for a no-deadline trial, taken 5 seconds to poke around, gotten distracted and forgot it ever existed.

That’s why launches and live events are such powerful marketing tools: they create a deadline to decide, in or out.

The SaaS equivalent is being very aware that you have an upcoming deadline to pay or cancel.

And your level of commitment to trying the app is so much higher when you’ve already gone to the trouble to take out your wallet.

In some cases, more friction leads to better results.

I absolutely know that there’s room for improvement in our onboarding UI and emails, and the app interface itself overall — there are so many ways I can create more sucess, *faster*… and that’s part of my plan.

But first we’re going back to the thing that worked.

I’m not committing to getting anything else done myself at this point because I’ve got one, maybe two days before I spend all day getting an infusion that will leave me groggy if not actually asleep.

I’m going to try to review the trial emails and sketch out the improved onboarding UI. But we shall see.