In my last report I shared my plan for the next few months. Not shockingly, I changed my mind about what I should do, but not much. Here’s my original plan:

1. Fix all of the products “critical” defects to the point where I’m not too ashamed of the product to recommend it (not a ton of work)
2. Make the in-app onboarding process not embarassingly terrible
3. Fuse the marketing site opt-in(s) together with the in-app onboarding process
4. Pay a professional designer to help make my marketing site not embarrassingly terrible
5. Get more traffic, optimize funnel, get more traffic, optimize funnel…

Between then and now I read Perry Marshall’s 80/20 Sales and Marketing at the behest of a mentor of mine. Perry’s advice is that if your sales funnel is not working, break your sales funnel into its pieces and optimize each piece, starting with the top of the funnel. My mentor actually suggested I do this exact thing and I didn’t take his advice, but now that I’ve read the 80/20 book I think my mentor was exactly right. I just didn’t understand before what he was saying. Here’s my new plan:

1. Pay a professional designer to help make my marketing site not embarrassingly terrible…I actually checked into my designer’s availability and she was booked up for at least a good month when I checked. I didn’t want to wait that long, so I went ahead and taught myself the very basics of responsive web design and coded up a non-embarrassing version of my site. So if you go to snipsalonsoftware.com, you’ll see a fully responsive version of the site. It’s not impressive but it’s not embarrassing. And of course, if you’re visiting this site well after September 2014, the version you’re seeing probably has little resemblance to the version I’m talking about. Having a professionally-designed version of the site is definitely on the roadmap. I just didn’t want this step to hold up everything else so I did an okay version myself.
2. Turn on a Google AdWords campaign. (I have this going right now. I turned it on a couple days ago. Again, following the advice in the 80/20 book.)
3. Fuse the marketing site opt-in(s) together with the in-app onboarding process
4. Make the in-app onboarding process not embarassingly terrible
5. Get more traffic, optimize funnel, get more traffic, optimize funnel…

So the steps aren’t much different. I mostly just reversed the order. I feel like I’m probably getting closer to knowing what the hell I’m doing because rather than shooting in the dark and fundamentally changing my mind every two seconds, my different plans are becoming more and more convergent.

If anybody’s curious about the details of my AdWords campaign, I’m doing $10.00/day. I have maybe 5 different keywords I’m bidding on and I’m split testing with each keyword. So far I’ve gotten 5 clicks (over two days), all on the same ad. My CTR for that ad is like 1.10%. I understand anything over 1% is considered good, so that’s cool.

I had had a salon in New Mexico sign up for a trial a couple weeks ago. Things seem to have been going good with them but from the schedule it looks like the main stylist, the only one who ever used the schedule, is on vacation right now. I called her yesterday and left a voicemail.

Another salon signed up for a trial last night, this one from North Carolina. The owner had a bunch of questions and put in a bunch of appointments which are both good signs.