yeah, the bathroom is around the corner to the right.
-$$$
Zip is going through a new iteration which I’m pretty excited about.
The week of March 16th I spent a bunch of money on ads. I was testing:
How many email signups can I get? Most customers take 2-3 weeks to convert and email drip campaigns allow me to stay in touch with them.
How many paying conversions can I get? I had just raised my price to $29. Would anyone pay that?
Where do people drop off in my funnel? I had just changed up my funnel to look more like learn more -> start homeschooling -> make an account -> start application -> pay. Before it was just start homeschooling -> start application -> pay. Homeschooling is a big decision and potential customers often asked me to email them “more information”, so, being more “information-heavy” in my new funnel is something I wanted to test.
I got about 600 clicks from Google Ads at about $2 a click.
Before the corona pandemic, I was getting clicks for around $1. The price doubled because the number of competitors buying ads have gone way up.
Also, before the pandemic, if you were looking up “how to homeschool” on Google and clicked on my ad, chances were you were a pretty serious lead. Not a lot of people just randomly looked up things like “how to homeschool in florida”.
After corona? Well, the amount of traffic has gotten way higher (good) but the quality of the leads has gone down (bad). Now you have plenty of people randomly looking up stuff like “how to homeschool ca” and I have to pay top dollar for them!
For $1200, I got 102 email sign-ups and two $29 sign-ups. That’s a $600 CAC w/ a 20 month payback period. Before, my CAC was around $75-$150.
Not a good look.
What’s cool though is I also got way more inquiry calls than usual. I have a “hotline” which anyone can call 24/7. Potential customers all had very similar questions:
How does curriculum work? Like, what will my child actually be doing and what’s my role?
Can I get a sample of your curriculum?
I want to homeschool my kids part-time while schools are closed, can you help?
Does your app give me like a schedule of what I need to do?
Does Zip have electives? How personalized is the curriculum?
My massive rise in CAC aside, what was more troubling was that what potential customers were asking for felt different from what I was building. My landing page, messaging, ads, etc all had pieces of what potential customer were looking for. But, nothing was really hitting it right on the head.
Even before the corona stuff, I was starting to feel this but now I really feel it because there has been an influx of potential customers whom I’ve been talking to.
Now what?
The usual! Big changes to messaging and product so that I can run new tests.
This next iteration is going to heavily focus on the day-to-day aspect of homeschooling: daily pre-built lesson plans, an easy to follow calendar, and record-keeping. I am not dropping the legal aspect of it, rather, this will be an up-sell rather than the main sell. Customer don’t care about how legal is done as long as it’s done. Their main focus is the day-to-day and how Zip can help with the daily homeschool activities. Shout out to Furqan for helping me see this.
At the beginning of the week, I hired 8 teachers (on UpWork) to help me build curriculum. A massive amount of progress is already being made here. Here’s a sample of kindergarten curriculum Candeece is working on:
I started coding up the UI yesterday. It’s coming along.
Lessons are stored in the DB as markdown and I just used react-markdown to render it. Also, Firebase for Go SUCKS. Like, REALLY bad. But, it still helps me move fast, tbh. If this iteration feels like it does well I’ll likely switch over to PostgresSQL + RDS.
I’m also working on content. So, going to hire some writers on UpWork today to write me some dope blog posts which always helps SEO and drip campaigns. Also, going to hire a product designer on UpWork next week. If you’re interested in this, hmu!
Song
Song of the week is Blueberry Faygo! It’s by Lil Mosey who is just 18. This video came out yesterday and it had 1.5 million hits in 5 hours. That’s pretty crazy even in the world of modern hip-hop.
See yah next week.