Failure To Execute: Tourney King Postmortem 1
Failures are more powerful than successes.
The Story
Tourney King was going to be a tournament app. Simply put, it would take the hard work out of building a tournament, such as double and single elimination, round robin, etc. Definitely nothing new, as there was already some entrenched players, and some were free. However all the paid options were downloadable for Windows only, they were old and looked like they haven’t been updated in a while, and their sales sites left something to be desired. And all the free options were 100% online, very generic and inflexible, and didn’t seem to have a very active user base. So my angle was to build up a kick ass sales site and create an app that could be used both online and off, with better marketing being my competitive advantage.
Another thing I noticed was that no one was serving the middle ground, those users who weren’t willing to pay $100+ for software they’d use maybe once or twice but needed something a little more powerful than free. So I thought I could try offering something in the middle, that didn’t require a commitment and could be used on demand.
At this point, everything is pure speculation on my part, but that was my beginning hypothesis.
Validating The Idea
The market was there, although, admittedly, I thinly validated it. To my defense, this was before I knew anything about “getting out of the building.” I setup a “thin” sales site, which is essentially a first cut web site defining a product that you think a market will plunk down money for, without an actual product. It had three pages:
- A landing page with a few mock screenshots and a few bullet points outlining the benefits and features I thought people wanted. There was also a fairly large “Get Started Now” button as a call to action, which took them to…
- A pricing page with a few options. I was uncertain of the price point and delivery options, so I experimented with this page quite a bit until I got some consistency, which aligned fairly well with my initial hypothesis. If they clicked on any “Buy Now” button, they were taken to a lead capture page, and I sent an email to myself so I knew which option they’d selected (crude, but effective).
- A “give me your email address” page. If a user made it to this page, they’d had made a pretty good commitment to buying. So I had a little message that said Tourney King is still under developed and will be launched soon. If you want to be alerted when it launches, enter your email address. Surprisingly, about 75% of people who made it this far, gave me their email address.
After running some AdWords campaigns targeting a handful of well trafficked tournament related keywords and making some tweaks here and there to the thin sales site, the results were promising. People were willing to pay around $50 for a downloadable software product, about $25 for an online only product (the least popular), and $5 to simply create a printable bracket.
How I Fucked Up…So Far
Although the market was there and there were people ready and willing to plop down hard earned money for a tournament app, I failed to calculate the cost of acquiring a paying customer through AdWords, which was going to have to be my main source of traffic for a while. Of course, this never came back to bite me in the ass, but it might have made me think twice before getting excited and diving into the building stage.
I collected around 50 email addresses from people who had already been qualified (i.e. there was a good chance they would have completed the purchase). What did I do with all those email addresses? Absolutely nothing! I saved them off in Mail Chimp so later, when I launched, I could send them all an exciting email about the debut of the greatest tournament app on the planet. If I could go back and punish myself, I’d have a midget repeatedly head butt me in the balls. What I should’ve been doing with those emails is talking to my potential customers and learning about their problems so I could build an app that would solve their most important needs. But I didn’t, and it cost me on the execution phase.
In part 2, I’ll outline my complete failure to execute and try to explain what I think went wrong. Teaser: it’s more psychological than technical.
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