The episode, in writing
by Richard Lovatt · from the episode above, checked against what was said
Running ads to the least frictionless way, aka join for free and get free episodes, I think might be the worst decision ever. But I'm trying to find a silver lining, and I think the silver lining is, look, it's making me improve the experience of the app. It's making me simplify things and create an onboarding experience that just is boom, okay.
But here's the reality, this is just facts, and I thought this late last night when I was going to sleep. I know this because I do sales and marketing in my other work, but the type of people who are coming through who see your ad and want to use it for free with no commitment and skin in the game are, I would say, generally not the type of people who I envisage using my app day to day. It's not that I'm trying to say I only want rich people with money, which I do, but more so that if it's just for free, not that this won't work, and it might for some people. When you see an ad, you're like, okay, that works. And I know this because I've done this myself a number of times. See an ad, okay, that's cool, yeah, I'll leave my email. Loads up. Something's a bit off. I don't know. I'm gone. See ya. And I'm experiencing that, and the reality is I'm paying for that.
And I weighed up in my mind yesterday. Imagine you get 300 signups from free. The conversion, or cost to actually acquire the customer there, might still be a lot of money, because if you get 200 and only five of them convert to being a paid customer, it's not great, is it? Whereas if you go the direct route, aka don't push them towards free, just do an ad towards paying, buy it now, you might pay more to acquire that customer, right, but it might actually be cheaper than the other one because you convert more of them. So anyway, that's a test that I'm just going to start to make. So I'm running X ads now.
Let's go through the X ads. So we've got campaigns. 105,000 impressions yesterday. We spent $500 overall. 177,000 impressions, 198 clicks. This is just a video campaign. This is just getting people to watch a video and then creating an audience from people who've watched it. You obviously put the link there, so people still have that option to click through, and out of all those, you've got 200 people who have clicked through. $2.50 per click. Not bad at all really.
So I think what I was trying to say here is I'm going to run this test. The people I'm creating an audience for now on X are going to build up a massive pool of people who watch the video. Then I'm going to just retarget them with two things. Number one, leave your lead, your email, and I'll email market them. And number two is buy. Just send them straight to the pricing page, or to a specific landing page that gives a video sales letter. Buy. Just buy it.
And I think one of the things that people, it's so weird that it makes you a bit nervous to try it, but you never know. This is a fact. You never know until you ask. I bet there's so many apps and bits of software and companies out there that have failed because going to sell and just selling into the world, just going, hey, buy my stuff, these are the reasons why you should buy, it's kind of daunting for a lot of people, even sat behind a computer. But the fact is, what I'm doing right now is asking people to use my app, not buy, and it's a long way around just asking to buy it, and it's good enough. It's awesome to be honest. So I'm going to start asking people, buy it.
So tomorrow, or maybe later today, I'm going to show you the current flow of when people see an ad through to using it as a free member, and we'll go through it and we'll see what we think.