Firstly, an apology. There’s been a bit of a hiatus on the blog front recently as the work needed to complete my graduation from the Silicon Valley Founder Institute program took priority. But that is done, and I feel hugely privileged to have been in the 2.3% that made it from applying for the London cohort, through to graduating. If any of you have an idea and are not sure where to take it, I’m happy to both recommend FI and to talk you through what to expect to see if you think it’s a good fit for you.
And now, onwards, to focus on our latest progress. We’re just weeks away from releasing the full version of the app as a beta for you all to try. In the meantime, our Technology Division, led ably by recent superstar recruit Rhett Clinton (to be introduced properly in an upcoming blog) has put together a prototype for you all to try, which we’ve called ALL IN Lite.
The concept here, as one feature of what you’ll get with ALL IN, is simply to be able to create an event or activity you fancy doing with some friends and paste the link into a chat group to gauge interest. After completing minimal registration everyone can easily vote their interest and organisers can see who can come and who can’t.
In the two weeks since we started to offer ALL IN Lite to trial groups we’ve picked up two men’s football teams, one ladies’ hockey team, some social events have been set up (while we still can) and one person is trialling using the app to manage restricted desk space bookings in their office under COVID rules.
Take up and feedback has been excellent and I find myself frequently checking the dashboard to check the…ahem…hockey stick growth.
But, of even more interest to me is the percentage of people that don’t push the link or button that we give them to trial the app. It should take less than a minute to register and look around, but some people don’t.
Some friends said “Great. I’ll definitely check it out.” But then didn’t. I can tell from the back end database, you see.
I followed up with one perfect candidate to trial the app to ask for feedback and they said they hadn’t clicked, replying “You only sent it yesterday!” As I say, it only takes a minute and then, if you like it, you can keep using it for free (for a limited time of course 😊).
Another responded to me saying “App looks super cool”, but they hadn’t clicked, and one superstar amazingly went in to bat for us to get his son’s football team to use the app in place of their current one. He hadn’t clicked our button link either.
So how do you get people to click? Many studies have shown that music massively influences purchasing behaviour. Customers will pay more for a product if classical music is played; will eat faster to music with a quicker tempo; in supermarkets French wine sales increase when French music is played, German wine sales increase when shoppers hear German Bierkeller pieces, and champagne sales go up in relation to classical music.
Other strategies that you might recognise which are commonly adopted on internet purchases include scarcity (“Only four items left”), social acceptance (“75 people have bought this today”), authority endorsement (“Recommended by Which” or, perhaps in my case, “Graduated from the Founder Institute”).
I’ve decided to split my blog audience this week to try different marketing tactics across randomly selected groups and see if any are more effective for me. For this mail, one marketing tip said people are more likely to respond if you are clear that it’s their choice whether or not to respond, and of course it totally is your choice.
So here we go. Below is a link to a fictional event I’ve created in ALL IN Lite. I would love you to click on it, register, and explore the app. If the app can be of use to you or someone you know, then that’s amazing. If you want to give any suggestions or feedback then that’s also fantastic. But ultimately, the choice to click is up to you:
Click here to try an event invite…or don’t. Your call!
Jules