S5E81
· 26:26
Hey. It's Matt. Welcome to Money Lab. I'm pacing here in the brewery, kinda waiting for a meeting, that's gonna happen in 1 hour. Hate meetings.
Matt Giovanisci:I honestly do. I wanna tell a story. Short one. I say it's short, but we'll see, of some of a decision I made today, and it was the right call. So on this episode, when I on the past episode, I was talking about how I was gonna create a custom pool.
Matt Giovanisci:So alright. Let me start from the very beginning. Yeah. I think I was starting from the beginning. Okay.
Matt Giovanisci:With on MoneyLab, I had this idea where I need it. So I was trying to figure out how to restructure the home page of Swim University. And the homepage has always been a confusing place for us because we don't know who's landing there. We don't know if you're a hot tub owner or a pool owner, until you make a decision from the home page. And so at the very top of the home page, we had a very, I would say, basic headline, wasn't really good, and then we have 2 buttons.
Matt Giovanisci:1 just just said pool care, and one said hot tub care, and all it did was take you to those respective category pages, which technically were already in the header. So very redundant home page. But, really, the home page was sort of like, well, there's nothing here for you. Get off the home page so so that we can figure out who you are. And we figure out who you are by what article are you reading.
Matt Giovanisci:Are you reading a pool article? Are you reading a hot tub article? And then we know. And then hopefully, we're trying to get your email address. That's that's kind of the it's kind of the main goal of this site, honestly, besides selling stuff.
Matt Giovanisci:So I was about to do a webinar, and I was just like, you know, our home page gets a ton of traffic. People search Swim University and Google, like we have good brand name recognition. And so I was like, you know, we should probably just make the homepage a little bit more specific. And I was gonna do this webinar for this other company, and they were like, where do you want us to send people to? And these were all gonna be pool owners.
Matt Giovanisci:I'm like, I don't know. Just send them to the home page. Who cares? But the home page is not a real good collection point for leads. And so I tried all these, you know, things where I was gonna create, like, a multi step pop up form that's like, hey.
Matt Giovanisci:Join our newsletter. And I'm like, no one wants a fucking newsletter, and, you know, no one wants more email, and I need to offer something. So I decided to just make the home page focused on pool owners. Since 80% of the people that are landing on that page are pool owners. Let's be honest.
Matt Giovanisci:And on the podcast, I was sort of like brainstorming how I would do this, what would be the message, and I came to this idea that, like, oh, let me create like, I always wanted to test out a quiz, right, as a lead generation, you know, resource. And the quiz was, like, not really a quiz, but basically, like, asking you information about your pool. You give it you, you know, you enter in your information, and then you just move forward. Right? And then it would whatever would happen.
Matt Giovanisci:So I came up with this idea, and there's been other episodes where I talked about I was designing the the the page, and, basically, what the lead magnet is is a custom pool care plan. It as I was brainstorming a bunch of ideas for it, the idea got really big and hairy, and I it was gonna take a long time to make. I was gonna do some coding stuff, and I you know, in the last episode, I talked about eating an elephant, and I took that concept and I broke it down into bite sized pieces of tasks that I need to do. It was one of the first tasks that I did, and perhaps was the easiest one, was to just break down what are the steps or what are the pieces of information for somebody who fills out nothing, somebody who just completely skips over the entire survey, what are they getting? Because I didn't make anything required except the email address.
Matt Giovanisci:So you could literally just skip every question, and then just enter your email address, and it would spit you out a custom plan. That custom plan is essentially our cheat sheet, which is a PDF that has been baked into HTML. And the reason we do that is so that I can change the copy of the plan based on what you select. So if you selected that you have, let's say, for the very simple example, an in ground pool versus an above ground pool. In an in ground pool, you would only you would have multiple skimmers.
Matt Giovanisci:You would have multiple returns, you may have step jets, whereas in an above ground pool, you only have one skimmer, and you only have one return. So literally, just depluralizing that that concept would be like pretty custom, And that's a simple simple example. There's a bunch of other examples that I have added. But basically, what I did is I took our cheat sheet, and I broke it down into the same sections, but I just added some more copy. And then I, you know, I already have the images, but I ended up changing all of them.
Matt Giovanisci:And I my first step was just write it all down, and I wrote it in Apple Notes. So I wrote it all down. That was my whole day. So basically, I took the cheat sheet, wrote everything down, and did Apple notes. So I had a list of, like I basically had a to do list.
Matt Giovanisci:Here are all the blocks that I need to create on this pool care plan page, and it made it much easier to design. I was able to design it. The design took a few tries. I I went back and forth, but it probably took me 4 to 5 hours to kind of put together, and then another day, I decided to work on all the images and put those up. And then today, you know, so I I had just been kinda slowly working on this day by day, couple hours a day.
Matt Giovanisci:Today, the plan was to go downstairs and into my office and create a start to codify it a little bit. So what I've what I ended up creating was a very general pool care plan that would work no matter what no matter what you typed in, no matter what thing you got. Right? So this this was gonna be for, again, anybody who entered no information. Here's your pool care plan based on no information.
Matt Giovanisci:Alright? That's the way that the page was set up. Today is the day I was going to go and start adding additional information based on what you chose, changing information based on what you chose. And I knew that that was gonna take all day, if not maybe today and tomorrow and possibly more as I came up with ideas, and I kept building out the page. And this morning and this is the this is the importance of giving yourself time and space when you're doing these projects and trying not to barrel through it with blinders on.
Matt Giovanisci:But today, I got up super early, not because I wanted to, just because sometimes I get up early. And I was like, alright. I'm gonna start I'm gonna start my day because I know it's gonna be a lot of work. So I took a shower and, you know, shower thoughts are real. And I was like, wait a minute.
Matt Giovanisci:Technically, the page is done. Like technically, no matter what you type in, you get to this page. And no matter what happens, it works. So this page is already valuable. It's not entirely custom yet, but there are little custom bits.
Matt Giovanisci:So there's you know, it's not it's but it's not fully customized yet. And I was like, well, what am I waiting for? To why can't I launch this right now? Because I'm at a point now where I could keep putting more and more and more customizations in it and make it bigger and bigger and bigger. But ultimately, what if nobody gives a shit?
Matt Giovanisci:And then at the end, I'm like, well, wow. That was that was a waste. That was like 3 weeks of my life or perhaps perhaps a month of my life building out this really awesome thing that I think is awesome, but no one's no one gives a shit. No one's taking no one's an no one's answering the question. No one cares about this plan.
Matt Giovanisci:Everyone just wants to cheat sheet. So I was like, oh, well, hold on. Let's instead of me going downstairs and doing that, let's launch this thing. Let's let's put it on the home page and see what happens. So I went downstairs and I made sure that everything worked.
Matt Giovanisci:I, you know, set up the I changed the home page to read, you know, save 100 by getting your own custom pool care plan or something like that. And then I have a button that just says get your free custom pool plan. When you click the button, it takes you to a type form, and you it asks you 3 questions, and then it asks for your email address, and then it sends you to our OTO page, our one time offer, and then it emails you a link that when you click that link, it will take you to the pool care plan page, where if you typed in any of those informations and we stored it, it will show you different information based on that. So it works. I launched that at 10 AM this morning, and our home page get does get quite a bit of traffic.
Matt Giovanisci:It is 440 on a single person has signed up. Now I realize that, you know, that's it's not enough time. But I will say, I'm glad I I'm glad I launched it because I would've spent all day working on this thing, and it's very possible. And I think it's too early to tell. It's not the weekend yet, and I think it's we're also not in pool season, but I think it's too early to tell if this is actually a good offer or not, or perhaps I have bad copy.
Matt Giovanisci:Now one thing I did on this page, one once you get the email and you land you know, you you see your pool care plan, in 30 seconds, an exit survey pops up in the bottom corner. And it basically asks you, like, was this helpful to you? If not, let us know or tell you know, so it's a little box and people can submit their responses. And then the next screen says you can just email us. Well, you know, that's that hasn't happened yet.
Matt Giovanisci:But I thought, well, instead of me going in and, like, customizing the living shit out of this, which I do plan on doing slowly but surely over time now that it's built, now that it's live, each time because it doesn't matter. It's it's it's evergreen. You can once if you save that email, you always have that link, and you can always go back to it, and it will just continue to get more customized over time. So I thought, wow, this okay. The exit survey, which is I always had had a plan to do it, and it's not technically an exit survey, it's just a survey that pops up, but I will learn so much information from that.
Matt Giovanisci:They'll be like, oh, I wish it had this. Now, obviously, people are gonna ask for things that I think are a little bit too much because, you know, we do have a course to sell. And the course the courses are for sale on that page, and it's on our OTO. So, like, you can buy things on that pool care plan page. But or like, oh, I wish this had videos or I wish this had something else or I wish that you know, whatever those things are, I'm gonna start collecting them and adding them to this page, assuming people are actually clicking it and people are actually going through it.
Matt Giovanisci:So far, no one has. Now the home page, I guess, is a spot where I realized that, okay, maybe this is not the best place for it, and I need a better spot. So one of the things I plan on doing is split testing it against a like, taking one of our more popular pages where we where we promote our cheat sheet and split testing it to, you know, to the to the pool care plan or perhaps doing specific Facebook ads, like a Facebook ad campaign, that would be a split test essentially to see which one gives me a better conversion rate. Right now, we're sending people to a very simple landing page, right, where they can get the cheat sheet, but I could create another landing page that's specifically for the the cheat sheet or not even a landing page or setting up the cheat sheet, the pool care plan. I don't even have to create a landing page necessarily.
Matt Giovanisci:I could just send people right to Typeform. So they entered they, you know, they just land on the page and they start we start asking them questions. So and then I could I can measure on Facebook ads which one gets more people to the goal, Which the goal is the same, it's our OTO page, which is our our basically, it's our, it's the page that we use to track lead conversions. Because if you the only way you hit that page is if you subscribe in some in some way, shape, or form. But the point of this story is to go, you know, if you slow down a little bit, in the process, I realized that, like, you know what?
Matt Giovanisci:I don't really have to do I can create what is I can create an MVP. Right? Minimum viable product. God, who was that? Lean startup?
Matt Giovanisci:I wanna say his name was Eric, coined that phrase. But this is something that, makes a lot of sense. And it and I you know, none of it was half I'm not saying what I created was half assed. What I created was was complete for now. I won't even say good enough.
Matt Giovanisci:It's good for now, and it will only get better from here as we start to get feedback. Or or perhaps it wasn't worth building in the 1st place because no one gives a shit, Or we have a bad or maybe we have bad leading copy that that needs to be split test. You know, I've split tested our cheat sheet so many times, but I'll I also think the phrase cheat sheet just works better. Now I thought custom you know, having the word custom in the word free, so it's like free custom plan versus free cheat sheet would do better because it it kinda feels like you're getting like I know cheat sheet sounds great because it's like it's a, you know, people love cheat sheets. It feels like a shortcut.
Matt Giovanisci:But a custom plan feels like it's a maybe hits a different part of your brain, maybe. I don't know. But so far, again, I think the home page is not the right spot for, but I'll be curious when we split test it against the cheat sheet offer and see if the plan because the the the, you know, the problem with it is that the the pool care plan, there's more hoops to jump through. You technically don't have to jump through them, but it's a series of questions, and you don't know how many questions there is. So it may have like, we'll find out, hey, people are going to this type form, but they're dropping off of this question, they're drop you know, maybe they don't understand it.
Matt Giovanisci:Although I kept it, you know, it's only 3 questions. Who knows? Perhaps they get to the emails screen and they're like, nope, fuck this, you know. So who knows? We'll find out all of this shortly, but I just wanted to relay the story that, you know, by taking my time and building this thing, I found out that like, hey, it's better to launch early and get that early feedback than it is to kind of, like, build out this huge, huge thing, and then and then come to find out no one really cares.
Matt Giovanisci:I think that that's why there's this movement in at least with me, and and I I see it with Miles Beckler who has been pushing this, the idea of the low ticket offer, because you can create low ticket offers. We're talking 5, 10, 15, $20 offers very quickly, especially in the digital space. And then you could just run ads or whatever or or do whatever to get you could to get eyeballs on it and just see how it performs. And worst cases, you maybe only worked a week on it. Wasn't that big of a deal.
Matt Giovanisci:I know a lot of what Miles talks about is, like, you can build the product in one sitting, but I think that there is something to that because you could spend all of this time like, we could spend like, I mean, this happened so many times in my life where I spent and and it eventually worked out, but I remember spending months on creating, like, our first products at Swim University and only to be met with, like, fuck. This didn't work. And then I had to make it work. So, you know, I just took it wasn't gonna it wasn't gangbusters out of the gate. You just gotta spend some time with it.
Matt Giovanisci:But we have some ideas on low ticket offers for just the people who are already on our list. They didn't buy anything from us. Perhaps they weren't in the right headspace at the time. Perhaps what we were offering was too expensive for them, but maybe we have something that they'd like that's a little bit more in their wheelhouse. So as long as we keep as long as we always have something to offer and it's not the same product over and over again, I think we'll be able to get a lot more mileage out of our email list than before.
Matt Giovanisci:And I also think too, one of the reasons why I really love this pool care plan idea, and I really hope that I can get it to outperform the cheat sheet. Who knows, honestly? I could even try to call it a custom cheat sheet, And that may you know, that that's something certainly worth AB testing. Right? I think if I can get this to work, it will perform so much better for us in many ways.
Matt Giovanisci:1 is and I've talked about this, I think, on another episode. Maybe I didn't say this on another episode, but I get I had a guy email me. No. I definitely talked about this, but I'll say it again. I had a guy email me, you know, in the pool industry, and he was like he was trying to download something from me.
Matt Giovanisci:He's having trouble doing something. And he goes, yeah. You know, I've been handing out your cheat sheet to all my customers. I'm like, oh, can you please not do that? Because that's how, like, that's how that you took you took our thing, and you're giving it like, you don't get to distribute that.
Matt Giovanisci:That's really weird. Right? Like, it's weird. Just be like, wow. This is a great resource.
Matt Giovanisci:Here here, I'm just gonna give it away for free. People do this all the time. They and they and it's like, it's not, you know, people with malicious intent or or trying to make a like, they do it as if they don't under they they they do it because they don't understand. And the reason I know they do it is because they don't understand so much that they're asking me for resources. And I'm like, you you're asking to steal from me.
Matt Giovanisci:That's what you're asking. You realize that? And they don't realize that. They think they're doing me a service. They're like, oh, no.
Matt Giovanisci:No. No. We're spreading the messages from university. I'm like, yeah, by giving away my course. What are you doing?
Matt Giovanisci:I that people pay money. It's a product. You know, like, even like, our cheat sheet is free. Yes. But it's our product to give out.
Matt Giovanisci:It is ours to distribute. And so, you know, this has been happening a lot in the beginning of the year. A lot of and again, I'm I'm hearing about it so much, and these are I'm hearing about it only for the people who are, like, not who are emailing me. So there are many more people who are just clearly downloading my cheat sheet, printing it, and giving the way. I've seen companies take my cheat I I've seen big companies, by the way, take my cheat sheet, literally my cheat sheet, put the put their logo over mine at the bottom, and then distribute it on their website as if it's theirs.
Matt Giovanisci:Big companies, not small people who are trying to you know, they just think this is okay. And I'm just like, you guys are just that's really fucked up. But they don't know how fucked up that is. It's like, wait a minute. Didn't you take English in high school?
Matt Giovanisci:Like, you know what plagiarism, right, is. Right? You know, like, you know how copyright law works. It's not that hard of a concept. So that's where I think this plan I really want this plan to work because it's uncopyable.
Matt Giovanisci:No one's gonna this is where, like, I'll I it'll it's like overly technical where they're not gonna figure out, oh, it's just a PDF. I can just print the PDF. It's not. It's a web page, and they're not gonna know how to how to duplicate that. Now they may go in and get their own plan and be like, woah.
Matt Giovanisci:This is great. Print a shitty version of it and go, well, I can't hand this out to my customers. And it's like, well, it's not and and because it's custom, they're not gonna want to because they're gonna be like, well, no. It's custom. You have to go and do it yourself.
Matt Giovanisci:And so, yeah, do we want pool companies to send people to our home page? We absolutely want that. Obviously, we want that. If you wanna tell your customers about us, I don't know why you would, but let's say you do, then send them to swimuniversity.com. Oh, if you have more questions, don't come back to us.
Matt Giovanisci:Go to this other resource. Never really understood why any any pool company would wanna do that because you're basically going, well, I don't need you anymore. Like, I'll just come buy stuff from you, but, like, I don't need to talk to you because I've learned everything from so many different like, we're anyway, that's a been doing this a long time, and I just like it's like no wonder a lot of these people aren't in business anymore. So, yeah, I think the the pool care plan, it it allows me to basically make a a beefed up cheat sheet and continue to make it fucking unbelievably good. Because a cheat sheet, let's be honest, it's only gonna be so good.
Matt Giovanisci:Right? It's a PDF, but, okay, I can make it 2 PDFs. It's like, okay. Yeah. Alright.
Matt Giovanisci:But it's like, again, anybody can take it. Anybody can distribute it. I'm not, you know, not that we have that much, not, you know, none of these people are really siphoning people away from us, honestly, but the the custom part, I think, builds a lot more trust. It feels a lot better. It can be packed with way more information, and it's a killer gateway into our course because it keeps people online.
Matt Giovanisci:It keeps people on our ecosystem, so I like that a lot. So hopefully, after today, we'll find out. We'll try to get some more sales and or try to get some more leads and see what happens. But I just wanted to let you know that's what I did today, and I thought it was interesting because, hey, we got it launched much sooner than I expected.
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