About the launch of the LendWings project, the loss of nerve cells and the rapid detection of errors
Hello. I am writing on behalf of an educational platform with courses from Western experts - LendWings .
We for some time did not update posts on Habré, but recently decided that it is worth resuming the blog for user feedback.
As I wrote in the last article , we registered a company in the Russian Federation and a month ago got access to funding under a partnership agreement, which allowed us to hire professional announcers and translators so that the Russian version of educational courses corresponded to the level of our authors.
')
In this article, I will tell you about the problems after launch, about how we analyzed the behavior of our first users, what they decided to change and add, and what mistakes we would no longer make. I will also share ideas that may be useful to startups that do not fulfill planned targets from the very start.
In early November, we were confident that we had finalized our first 10 educational programs in different directions to the desired level, and after numerous delays, finally, it was time to start.
Most likely, this confidence came from a passionate desire to quickly start activities, because we developed the project for about half a year, and everyone was pretty fed up with this routine.
We conducted several tests of the system, prepared materials for social networks a month in advance, conducted a newsletter, included some advertising, and began to look at the numbers in the Metric.
And boom ...
What happened to many new startups happened.
A day later came the first client.
After two more.
A week later - five more.
The angle of deviation from the planned figures became more and more.
Battle fuse began to go on the decline.
New authors are needed, but somehow they are not being written, new ideas are needed - they are not invented.
It seems to be a funnel, but with the traffic that came to us, it is 5 times worse than planned.
It seems that we have both cool authors and people who show interest through all communication channels - but business cannot be built on interest.
Our bounce rates seemed more than satisfactory; good viewing depth; decent time on the site.
What is going on? Whether the skis do not go ...
Very often in Metric, average values are misleading:
And all because everyone, even the most promoted young project, has 30 to 50 people who have a special loyalty because of friendly, family, partner or even some kind of relationship.
Therefore, when we panicked for the first two weeks, Metric very well helped shake this panic and make it even more difficult. After all, if you go deeper into paranoia, then you can find conversion goals, which is very decent and hundreds of transitions to the payment page, and many other tormenting factors.
Fortunately, if you are not a chronic melancholic, then temporary depression from that is called temporary, which it tends to pass. And the sooner a person who launched something, and this something did not start to work according to plans, leaves the vicious circle of experiences, the sooner the bright strip of creative activity will begin. And this is due to the fact that no conclusions are made on a bad head and no analysis is done.
About two weeks after the sluggish start, we gathered at the office, opened the metric, and looked more closely at what is happening on the site.
The picture cleared up when we studied the behavioral factors, the scrolling and clicks map, and most importantly, the distribution of these same indicators across a sample of our unique visitors.
The vast majority of visitors spent on the site just 20 seconds:
During this time, people managed to:
- For 10 seconds, view the main page and do not get an answer to the question "What are you doing and why do I need this."
- In another 10 seconds, view one internal page of the person who liked the name of the course and squander a ton of boring text.
- Leave site
In a word, users in those 20 seconds managed to understand absolutely nothing.
They saw a heavy massive text, included a preview, looked at a price tag of 70-100 dollars, and left the site, at best, leaving a note in their memory that there is some kind of site with a colorful flat design and some Western courses.
We also noticed a terrible epic file: users in Chrome blocked the socket when opening the site in two tabs, and instead of video on any free or paid series, an error HTML5 error appeared: video file not found. So, the absence of normal testers, the desire to accelerate, and here is the result - part of the first traffic sees an error in the video, on the project about the video :)
In order to talk heart to heart with users, I tried to conduct a newsletter, but such a mass survey is not always effective. After all, people do not like being addressed as impersonal units of this very mass.
I decided to do the following: take everyone who came to the check - authorization page from the database, see their frequency of appearance on the site, and go to them with a question. Like: "What the hell you left and didn’t want to do anything further."
As a result, it turned out that in addition to problems with the video, our site did not give answers to basic questions, even for the most persistent users:
- why we declare high quality content and ask for money
- whether we translate the product, or just sell other people's videos
- why is it more profitable here than in the western areas?
- how are we going to associate students with course authors
- where to read reviews about courses from users
- where to watch free episodes
We decided that since we were fools and did not explain anything to anyone, now we need to act on the contrary, and explain everything from the main page itself and immediately.
To do this, right now changes are being made to the site in terms of design and functionality.
Now:
- We instantly convey information that all our training programs have been translated into Russian and that our translators and announcers are high-quality professionals (for this, the corresponding Top Bar is about to appear on the site).
- We guarantee that if the information course does not prove useful, we will refund you the money spent.
- We have agreed that for our Russian-speaking audience, many of our Western authors give a discount of up to 30% of the price of the original course.
And also, we made more explicit the following:
- The opinion of our users about the products you can now read on the course pages.
- You can ask questions to the authors, and count on a prompt reply, which will be translated and redirected by us.
- You can watch the first 4-6 free lectures in any paid course, but without the internal functionality of the site.
After eliminating errors in the video, and optimizing key information about the project, we finally got a positive result, and once again made sure that the project, which positions itself as the best in any business (in our case, localizes powerful educational courses from well-known experts) should cultivate perfectionism.
Now we are thinking about a closed forum in which all our users will be able to share information on certain courses or subject-related topics, as well as adding interesting learning tools.
Next time I will tell in detail about the authors from the most different corners of the globe who went with us from the very start and why they teach better than others.
But this is me running ahead, but for now - welcome!
We are glad to present LendWings .
We for some time did not update posts on Habré, but recently decided that it is worth resuming the blog for user feedback.
As I wrote in the last article , we registered a company in the Russian Federation and a month ago got access to funding under a partnership agreement, which allowed us to hire professional announcers and translators so that the Russian version of educational courses corresponded to the level of our authors.
')
In this article, I will tell you about the problems after launch, about how we analyzed the behavior of our first users, what they decided to change and add, and what mistakes we would no longer make. I will also share ideas that may be useful to startups that do not fulfill planned targets from the very start.
MVP and unstable prototype are two different things.
In early November, we were confident that we had finalized our first 10 educational programs in different directions to the desired level, and after numerous delays, finally, it was time to start.
Most likely, this confidence came from a passionate desire to quickly start activities, because we developed the project for about half a year, and everyone was pretty fed up with this routine.
We conducted several tests of the system, prepared materials for social networks a month in advance, conducted a newsletter, included some advertising, and began to look at the numbers in the Metric.
And boom ...
What happened to many new startups happened.
A day later came the first client.
After two more.
A week later - five more.
The angle of deviation from the planned figures became more and more.
Battle fuse began to go on the decline.
New authors are needed, but somehow they are not being written, new ideas are needed - they are not invented.
It seems to be a funnel, but with the traffic that came to us, it is 5 times worse than planned.
It seems that we have both cool authors and people who show interest through all communication channels - but business cannot be built on interest.
Our bounce rates seemed more than satisfactory; good viewing depth; decent time on the site.
What is going on? Whether the skis do not go ...
Do not look at the general numbers until you have tens of thousands of unique visitors.
Very often in Metric, average values are misleading:
And all because everyone, even the most promoted young project, has 30 to 50 people who have a special loyalty because of friendly, family, partner or even some kind of relationship.
Therefore, when we panicked for the first two weeks, Metric very well helped shake this panic and make it even more difficult. After all, if you go deeper into paranoia, then you can find conversion goals, which is very decent and hundreds of transitions to the payment page, and many other tormenting factors.
Fortunately, if you are not a chronic melancholic, then temporary depression from that is called temporary, which it tends to pass. And the sooner a person who launched something, and this something did not start to work according to plans, leaves the vicious circle of experiences, the sooner the bright strip of creative activity will begin. And this is due to the fact that no conclusions are made on a bad head and no analysis is done.
At an early stage it is useful to engage in piece-wise monitoring of user behavior.
About two weeks after the sluggish start, we gathered at the office, opened the metric, and looked more closely at what is happening on the site.
The picture cleared up when we studied the behavioral factors, the scrolling and clicks map, and most importantly, the distribution of these same indicators across a sample of our unique visitors.
The vast majority of visitors spent on the site just 20 seconds:
During this time, people managed to:
- For 10 seconds, view the main page and do not get an answer to the question "What are you doing and why do I need this."
- In another 10 seconds, view one internal page of the person who liked the name of the course and squander a ton of boring text.
- Leave site
In a word, users in those 20 seconds managed to understand absolutely nothing.
They saw a heavy massive text, included a preview, looked at a price tag of 70-100 dollars, and left the site, at best, leaving a note in their memory that there is some kind of site with a colorful flat design and some Western courses.
We also noticed a terrible epic file: users in Chrome blocked the socket when opening the site in two tabs, and instead of video on any free or paid series, an error HTML5 error appeared: video file not found. So, the absence of normal testers, the desire to accelerate, and here is the result - part of the first traffic sees an error in the video, on the project about the video :)
If users do not write, take the first step: start writing them yourself
In order to talk heart to heart with users, I tried to conduct a newsletter, but such a mass survey is not always effective. After all, people do not like being addressed as impersonal units of this very mass.
I decided to do the following: take everyone who came to the check - authorization page from the database, see their frequency of appearance on the site, and go to them with a question. Like: "What the hell you left and didn’t want to do anything further."
As a result, it turned out that in addition to problems with the video, our site did not give answers to basic questions, even for the most persistent users:
- why we declare high quality content and ask for money
- whether we translate the product, or just sell other people's videos
- why is it more profitable here than in the western areas?
- how are we going to associate students with course authors
- where to read reviews about courses from users
- where to watch free episodes
Talk about the benefits as if none of your visitors stay on the site for more than 20 seconds.
We decided that since we were fools and did not explain anything to anyone, now we need to act on the contrary, and explain everything from the main page itself and immediately.
To do this, right now changes are being made to the site in terms of design and functionality.
Now:
- We instantly convey information that all our training programs have been translated into Russian and that our translators and announcers are high-quality professionals (for this, the corresponding Top Bar is about to appear on the site).
- We guarantee that if the information course does not prove useful, we will refund you the money spent.
- We have agreed that for our Russian-speaking audience, many of our Western authors give a discount of up to 30% of the price of the original course.
And also, we made more explicit the following:
- The opinion of our users about the products you can now read on the course pages.
- You can ask questions to the authors, and count on a prompt reply, which will be translated and redirected by us.
- You can watch the first 4-6 free lectures in any paid course, but without the internal functionality of the site.
Quick error analysis and elimination always brings results
After eliminating errors in the video, and optimizing key information about the project, we finally got a positive result, and once again made sure that the project, which positions itself as the best in any business (in our case, localizes powerful educational courses from well-known experts) should cultivate perfectionism.
Now we are thinking about a closed forum in which all our users will be able to share information on certain courses or subject-related topics, as well as adding interesting learning tools.
Next time I will tell in detail about the authors from the most different corners of the globe who went with us from the very start and why they teach better than others.
But this is me running ahead, but for now - welcome!
We are glad to present LendWings .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/205664/
All Articles