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Lee: Before we start today’s show, let me share with you something super exciting that we are launching. That’s an event here in the UK all around helping you transform your agency. So if you look back over the last year, maybe two years, and feel frustrated that maybe you’ve not moved forward, then this is the event for you. Check it out over on Agency Transformation Dot live. That’s agency transformation Dot live. We have got speakers from all around the world here to help you plan your next 90 days, your next three months, your next year, whatever that needs to be to help you get the level of transformation that you need in your business. That’s agency transformation. Dot live. We’ll see you there. Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer Podcast. This is your host, Lee. And on today’s show we are talking with Adam Lacey, talking split testing. That’s AB testing. That’s testing stuff instead of guessing stuff. So sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. Welcome to a conversation with me. It’s Mr. Lee Jackson and today we have on the show a return visitor from episode 111. It’s the one the only Mr. Unconventional marketer, it’s Adam Lacey.
Adam: Hey, how you doing?
Lee: Hey, hey, that was quite a big introduction. I was expecting more of a. Hey, you know, that kind of. Should we do that one again? It’s Adam Lacey. Hey, hey. Oh, you sounded almost American. I quite like that. Oh, God. Yeah, but he’s very British indeed. I think I used your wedding picture, didn’t I, for, uh, the podcast artwork. Uh, of episode 111 had to be an unconventional marketer. And you, you just look so lovely and handsome in that picture. Can I reuse that for this episode?
Adam: Yeah, I go for other nominees, to be fair. So you’re actually.
Lee: Looking off into the distance as well like this, you know, really wise sage.
Adam: Oh, like it’s all gone wrong.
Lee: We still married, so. Yeah. Yeah.
Adam: She hasn’t got rid of me yet.
Lee: So has it gone that wrong yet? And you’ve just moved as well, which is a test for any relationship, I think.
Adam: Yeah. Tell me.
Lee: Uh, dear mate, thanks so much for coming back on the show. It’s really good to catch up because I know a lot of things have changed, so I wanted to get you back on. I wanted to find out what’s been going on in your life. And I know you’re working on a project as well. That’s really exciting. So I’m going to drill your brain for some wisdom and also to find out more about your project as well. But before we do all that, for the people that don’t know who you are, could you give us a brief introduction of who you are, what your favourite colour is, your favourite drink or something that you feel people may not know about you?
Adam: Yeah, my name is Adam Lacey. I’ve been running a digital agency for about 7 to 8 years now, and more recently, I’ve embarked on the challenge of launching my own SaaS platform called Split Hero. My favorite color is blue or navy.
Lee: That’s a nice color.
Adam: And my favorite drink. Or a big fan of cocktails. So, um, but it depends on my mood. Which one do like many cocktails?
Lee: What’s your mood right now?
Adam: Oh, I probably go for a good strawberry daiquiri.
Lee: I don’t even know what that is. And you said it in such a British accent as well. I just I just know the Americans are all giggling right now. A strawberry. I think they would say a strawberry.
Adam: Yes, they probably would. Yeah. Oh.
Lee: Berry daiquiri. Whatever you just said. Sorry, Americans, we do love you a lot. Okay. And, uh, strawberry daiquiri. And then if you’re in a bad mood because presumably you’re in the best mood right now, what would be the cocktail?
Adam: Oh, bad. I think I probably actually end up sipping on a JD. Probably.
Lee: Oh, yeah, I get that. Yeah, I totally get that. If you’re in a bad mood, that’s fine. I got into mojitos, which I’m not sure if that’s a cocktail or not, but when I went on holiday last year, they served me a mojito and I just fell in love. And, um, I’ve been trying to make them at home since, and they don’t taste the same.
Adam: No, I think it’s the sun. The sun makes all the difference.
Lee: I could buy one of those sad lamps, couldn’t I? That would kind of replicate the sun in this really cold weather that we’re having right now. So, yes. Have you had the snow there yet?
Adam: No, we do this afternoon. I’ve literally just been upgraded to an amber weather alert, so.
Lee: Oh, nice. So Phillip Schofield shared on Snapchat just the other day, it says yellow snow alert. And he’d written on the comment, you know what they say about yellow snow. Obviously they forgot their karma. But anyway, enough humor. So mate, a lot has changed since we last had our conversation. You were running your agency you have a big focus on, I think it was weddings, and you’d also given us a lot of wisdom as well about print and how print is not dead. It’s just changing. I think that was definitely my favorite phrase from that episode. Folks, don’t forget you can check that out over on agency trailblazers.com. We’ll make sure we put show notes in there with a link to that old episode called How to Be an Unconventional Marketer. And you are very unconventional. You like to try new and exciting things. And this is why I wanted to get you on the show. I know what you’ve been up to in the background. You’ve been launching something called Split Hero, which helps people do split testing. But rather than talking about that right now, I selfishly want you on the show to educate me and the audience all about split testing, the benefits of it. Is it something we should or could be offering to our clients? Is it something we could or should be using? You know, all of those sorts of things. So I’ve got a range of questions I would like to hit you with. So are you up for this?
Adam: Yeah. Far away.
Lee: All right, mate. So the first the most obvious question is what is split testing.
Adam: Yeah, sure. So I guess the most I get asked this a lot. I guess the most simplest explanation I can come up with is comparing two different variations and seeing which one best achieves the outcome. You’re looking for.
Lee: Is there any sort of real world example I could do this in now? Like not digitally and not digitally.
Adam: I guess if you went old school, you could send out two different like mail campaigns in snail mail, and then you can see which one gives you more responses.
Lee: That’s interesting. And is it therefore would I be tracking the responses or would I also be tracking the sale? So one might get more responses like if you stop mailing me, but the other one would get less responses, but would actually maybe actually get some sales. So which would be the winner there? Yeah, we’re.
Adam: Always looking for those sounds.
Lee: Rather than the few responses. Yes. All right. So that makes sense. So you know, if we were going to just look at this in an old fashioned world, I am going to test even my flyers. It could be that I’ve printed off a whole lot of flyers. I’m posting them to 8000 homes here in finding where we live. And I’m going to split test my flyers. I’m going to have two different designs or two different types of wording or something like that, and then see which one works the best, presumably as well, because we’re now talking the non-digital world. I’d have to find some way of finding out which flavor it came from. But you know, that I guess, is the beauty of the internet. So split testing then, is doing what we’ve described there online, presumably. Is that just with websites, or can you split test all sorts of things?
Adam: Yeah, no. In theory you can sort of split test pretty much anything you put out there online. Obviously, depending on what that is, depends on the complexity. But yeah, the most common ones seem to be split testing landing pages. Yeah. Whether that be leading to like an inquiry or leading to an actual sale of some sort or a newsletter sign up even, you know, if you’re really looking to try and build a list, some people will split, test different landing pages and see which one leads to more and more sign ups. That’s quite popular.
Lee: That’s good. And do you? Because I’m thinking of split testing, potentially creating more work for me as an agency, does that mean I have to, you know, create completely new page layouts, etc.? Or can I be testing just very specific elements?
Adam: Yeah, there’s a couple of ways you can go about it. There’s some platforms that will let you change very specific elements via JavaScript where us will be. I mean, our platform will allow you to test whole different pages, but it’s still up to you how much you change that page. So, you know, if you just change the heading, that’s absolutely fine. We can still compare the two pages, obviously one with the different heading. And there’s sort of pros and cons to both really. I mean I like the whole page differentiation anyway because then you can try to try a few things so you can change the call to action, change the hero message. Perhaps you know, you can change an image out, for example, or change the content language, you know, and I think that’s a really good way of going about it.
Lee: Now that I think that is really helpful because I mean, for me, I, I have heard of split testing. I’ve looked at Google split tester and then walked away because I had no idea what I was meant to be doing, didn’t really have the time to spend messing around with it. I’ve seen that there’s plugins on WordPress for split testing, and uh, I’m one of those people that if you don’t have kind of four and a half stars on the on the WordPress plugin repository, I’m probably not going to touch you. So I’ve kind of just always avoided it. But then when I heard that you were getting into this in a big way, it really piqued my interest. And I do want to learn more. I’ve got enough knowledge where we’ve done some split testing in the past. We’ve always got an expert in to help us with the split testing, so it’s always been quite an expensive project for us. But we’ll get someone in, we’ll do a bit of split testing. Are there any kind of third party services that you could use as well, to not necessarily have to test some of these things with the real world? So, for example, you know, doing some sort of user testing as well. Would this be a good use case for it.
Adam: Yeah, potentially. I mean our platform is certainly not quite ready for that. But yeah, I mean there is people that obviously are test user interfaces that go on and stuff conversion optimization and it kind of all falls into that category. And in terms of being more work for yourself, I like to think of it not really as more work for you as an agency owner or a web designer or a developer, but more of an opportunity to make more revenue from your clients.
Lee: It was an opportunity, yeah, to to make it right. So we’ve just relaunched down Goole crown.com and we’ve put what we think is best. But I’m the first to admit that we have not tested this whatsoever. I have absolutely no idea if this is going to work. I do know that our old MVP site that we launched last year, I think, or two years ago, did not convert very well. It didn’t really give the right messaging, etc. so we’ve overhauled this based on our best guesses and looking at Google Analytics, looking at what we think are the most popular pages. So we’ve done something, but I have no idea if this is going to be right. We have we have seen more forms coming in of people having some basic inquiries. So that’s a positive. But again, I have no idea whether I could be changing things slightly, moving stuff around, even on this home page, for example, to see whether or not we can increase those, those signups to our mailing list or increase those questions that come in, etc.. So I’m very conscious that that’s something that we should be doing as an agency just for our own sales page, because it may be more work for us to come up with alternative wording, but in the long run, if we’re going to get some more high paying leads through that extra investment of time and you know, then it kind of pays for itself that time and that service pays for itself. Now what I’m interested in then, mate, you mentioned something that that piqued my interest. Yes, I can use split testing for myself, obviously to make my copy and my websites better so I can convert more and therefore in theory, make more money. But I think you might have been alluding to I can actually help clients make more money with split testing. Can you kind of unpack that a little bit for us? How can we as an agency, use split testing to the benefit of our clients as well as to ourselves?
Adam: Yeah, sure. So like you say for yourselves, it’s really I mean, you know, we’ve all been doing this or some of us been doing this for a long time. And no matter how much we do it, like you say, everything we do is always really our best guess based on experience. Yeah, when it comes to design and bits and pieces and different call to actions and, you know, all that stuff, it’s always a best guess where what we’re trying to do is take away the guessing and give you the hard data. So like you say, it might be a bit more work to come up with a few different taglines and to switch up the content and maybe decide how this should go above the fold instead. Uh, for example. But then you could put that variation to split hero and we’ll that’s how you say, right? You know, for these little changes, you’ve reduced your bounce rate sort of 6% and led to this much, many more conversions. So it really makes a big difference, like you say, to your own business. But for clients as well, it’s a fantastic way to upsell and give yourself extra work as well and make it sort of recurring work, because split testing never truly is ever over. You know, if you can always come up with something better, then why not? So, you know, we always have a set period of time to analyze the data over whether it be a month, six months, a year, and then after that period, you’re obviously going to have a winner and say, okay, this one performed the best, and then you start the process all over again. So that’s exactly what you can do with clients. I mean, it’s really popular now that a lot of agencies and I mean a lot of clients come on board as sort of landing page clients rather than sort of for websites. And this fits perfectly with that. You know, if you if a client comes on and once you create a landing page for a service or a sign up, you know, if they’re a coach or something like that, that you can do just that. Normally it would work as you know, you build a landing page, you’ll have your revisions normal and you launch. And that would be it. If you there’s two ways you could do it. You could do it as a separate server. So you can include it in a specific care plan for the client and say like, hey, we’re going to come up with another variation with some slight differences, and we’re going to run this test for you and explain to them how it works and explain the difference it makes to them and their business. And then once you have that data to show them. So, you know, if you give it two months and at the end of that period you say, oh, by the way, this small change we made for you meant you got, you know, ten more people. Sign up to your newsletter. How about we want another campaign for you? We just need to charge you to create another landing page. And then straight away, you’re getting that sort of recurring revenue, being able to create new landing pages for the client.
Lee: I’ve never thought of it this way, but this potentially sounds like as well. I kind of foot in the door with people who already have an existing website that they don’t necessarily want to invest anymore in at present, but they do want to be looking at generating, you know, generating leads, generating sales, etc. for specific products. And this allows you then to upsell them that way. But equally, I’d never thought of adding split testing to your care plan as well, which is quite interesting because things change, don’t they? People’s appetite changes, the economy changes all the time. So what people are looking for this week may be different in three months time, especially if somebody is in more kind of a retail sales environment, etc.. So I’d never, ever considered that. That’s quite an interesting one. Yeah, it’s really good.
Adam: I mean, especially for the marketers out there, because, for example, I mean, I’ve had myself you have clients that have got sort of terrible websites, but they’re willing to spend sort of a fair amount of money on a pay per click campaign, for example. Yeah. And it’s really hard to sort of you kind of want to not take the project on, on the basis that you don’t feel you’re doing the client justice with what they got, and they won’t sort of listen to you to have a new website done. Well, this is a perfect example, you say, right, okay, I’ll do it on the basis that you let me create. So, you know, you’re just being you scope out the project and have a price for this. And you say like we’ll do this for X. And what we’ll do is we’ll have your website for some of the traffic, and we’ll have our landing page for some of the traffic. And then all of a sudden, if your new fancy landing page converts more than their old website, it’s going to be a great way to get your foot in the door to say, imagine what we could do if we can do the whole website for you.
Lee: Oh, that’s a little bit of a mic drop moment then, isn’t it? Like I told you so. Yeah. Without being a douche. Because you’re showing them the results.
Adam: Exactly. And most of the time it’s all about the results. If client sees results, they’re willing to keep paying. It’s always been the same for us, isn’t it? You know, our businesses will happily pay for site if we see the results. Yeah.
Lee: No. That’s phenomenal. So definitely a way for you to accept those projects where someone might have a dire website, but you can at least help them with their pay per click campaigns and then eventually morph this into a full new website build. Because here are the results. We can see that this landing page converts better than your contact page, or your blog page, or your home page that you’re sending people to. And that’s something that often frustrates me about pay per click. When you see quite an engaging pay per click advertisement, and then you click and you land on their home page, and the entire screen is a picture of their team Yeah. And. Yeah. And and they’ve now lost me because I don’t know where to go and find that bit that they’d hooked me in on. So, uh, yeah, definitely something that would be be good. Now, one thing I’m interested in, again, I really know the basics. I’ve always got experts involved with our click testing campaigns, and as an agency owner, you kind of can’t learn everything. It’s it’s quite it’s there’s just too much. So you need to have the right people doing the right jobs, etc.. So we’re not doing split testing at the moment for any of our clients, and we’re not doing it for ourselves. It’s not something we’ve done for for about a year now, since we had our last contractor in to help us with a project. So I feel like I would like to understand more about this because it’s something I want to make sure I’m doing for both of my businesses. One thing I don’t understand is how long you should be leaving it to understand who should be winning, if that makes sense. Like if I do a split test campaign. So let’s do this on the Angled Crown website, I’m going to create two versions of the Angled Crown website. People are going to hit that. Will I say it’s a landing page about WordPress development or something. And I’ve got two different versions and I’m sharing it on social media and I’m sending out an email campaign maybe, or whatever, and maybe I’m doing some paid advertisement. How long should I leave that? Is it an amount of time, or is there a magic number of visitors that I should be considering for me to then select who the winner is?
Adam: Yeah, sure. So it’s really, I would say, rather than a length of time, it’s more number of visitors. But I don’t think there truly is a magic number because some niches will have like loads of traffic. But you know, you’re going to be getting a lot of unqualified buyers versus, you know, your marketing might be really highly targeted. So, you know, generally speaking, you’re going to get less users, but those users are going to be more engaged. So I don’t think that’s truly a magic number. But I normally say because people also say, is it right for them, you know, should they be doing it at all? Do they have enough traffic? And I always say, as long as you’re in the high hundreds of visits a month. So if you’re looking like sort of six, 700 and upwards a month, that’s certainly a good time to start testing because you’ve got the traffic there. Yeah. In terms of time. Personally, I think three month periods work well because then you can sort of do four large tests a year. But there’s nothing to say if you’re getting a lot, a lot of traffic. It’s nothing to say. You can’t do it over a 4 to 6 week period. Um, it’s totally flexible to you, really. But yeah, that’s kind of my rough guidelines, as I normally recommend.
Lee: Okay. So if you’re you’re doing a campaign where you’re driving a lot of traffic, then it’s something you can turn around fairly rapidly because you’re going to have some numbers within a week or so, and then you can start to adjust to make changes there. If it’s something that’s a bit more longer term, then and you’ve also got maybe lower traffic numbers, it’s going to take a longer time to get more reliable results. Then maybe commit to longer periods of time like 2 or 3 months, etc.. Yes. Before you then make make decisions. Obviously, even if you only have a low number of people visiting your site, you can change that if you’re going to invest in pay per click campaigns. But I’m guessing therefore if I’m going to like, we’re going to start doing that. For example, for the Agency Transformation Live event, we’ve just been drafting up some of our ads for Facebook, for example, and we’re going to drive people to landing pages, and we’re going to want to be able to split test the effectiveness of those landing pages for actually selling tickets. And we don’t get a lot of traffic to that website, but we know we can drive a lot of traffic to that website. So I’ll probably engage in maybe the 2 to 3 week turnaround that you’ve recommended out of necessity, because the events in three months anyway, or two and a half months. But but that’s really helpful for me. So you can see why I selfishly got you on the show, because I’m also doing a free consultancy here for selling tickets for the For the trailblazer event. In fact, I think this will go out in a month’s time. So I think the event will be in a month and a half or so. So folks, agency transformation dot live. If you’ve not got your tickets, be there because Troy Dean is there. Adam Lacey is not there. He’ll be in Florida. But that’s fine because Florida is awesome. But we’ll also have Paul Lacey at least be one Lacey representing. Exactly. Not you’re not related. But anyway, hey, Paul Lacey got his, uh, his mention here rolling the jingle. We need a new jingle, though. We definitely need a new jingle by now because the the old one. People keep thinking he’s Jamaican or something.
Adam: There it is, folks. Another policy reference. This podcast is no official. Ha ha.
Lee: Ha. Anyway, that is really helpful then. So thank you very, very much for helping me understand that. And I’m sure there’s people listening who also agree with this. Now, with regards to the sorts of technology that’s out there, I use WordPress for my own corporate sites. I’m using Elementor for my client sites because of the development that I’m able to do with it. I use Beaver Builder for client sites, allowing them to drop modules in, etc. so for me to start a B testing as it were, or split testing the sorts of web pages we have tried looking at, you know, the what what’s the Google service called you got?
Adam: I think they keep changing. I think it’s Google experiments or Google Google experiments.
Lee: Yeah. So we did start looking at that and I wasn’t really sure what to do. I mean I didn’t actually give it that much time. Maybe if I just watch a few videos I’ll be fine. I’ve then looked at a few services, but they all seem expensive and there’s nothing that specifically works with these two items. There’s I think there’s a split test specifically for Elementor that I’ve not looked in to, but I’ve not found anything as yet for Beaver Builder itself. So that’s kind of a struggle that we’ve got at the moment. Now you are launching Split Hero over the next few months. You’re looking to try and help people who like me on don’t really have the time to kind of unpack really complicated systems like Google experiments, or don’t want to be reliant on specific plugins necessarily because they use multiple services. So, in fact, I was one of the people that you were talking to. You’re drilling me for for what I’m doing and you’ve been evolving your, your service, your ideas, etc., and your roadmap for people like me, agency owners that are building websites, etc. or offering services. So can you just tell us what sparked the initial idea of Split Hero and how are you going about getting this all together to bring it to launch?
Adam: Yeah, so the initial idea, like I’ve been brainstorming now for about two years and it’s changed shape in that time way a lot. Initially we what I thought of it being a plugging specifically for Beaver Builder. And then it so happened while during the brainstorming phase that a company called Seed Prod launched just that. It has since been abandoned, that they no longer continue development of it and pulled it. But yeah, that’s what it was like. Huh? Someone’s just done that. Okay, that’s not good. So that that put it back on the backburner for a little while. And then I looked at it as a WordPress as a whole. And then like there’s one half, okay, split testing plugin out there on WordPress, which again, was just a little bit more complicated than I’d expected it to be. So really. Well. And then obviously we looked at the third party services. Um, optimizely VW. Oh, I think one there’s a few out there and they’ve all sort of gone to the enterprise level of clientele, so they tend to be all the bells and whistles. They’re really good, but they’re very complex and they’re very expensive. Yeah. And that that’s kind of, you know, there’s nothing entry level really, apart from like you say, you got Google Optimize, which is free, but on the flip side, you’ll probably pull your hair out a little bit and it’s not as user friendly either. And times money. So yeah, the idea was to really come up with something that’s going to be super user friendly, not just for people that know tech like yourself, but also for people that, you know, just go public and build their website with Elementor and be the builder and that kind of stuff. So I’m trying to basically bring this is a big ambition, but I want to bring split testing to the masses essentially. So I want everyone to be able to not feel afraid of split testing anymore, no one to shy away from it anymore and be like, yeah, we can do that. And it’s super simple to do. You know, you can either add value to your own business with it or you can, you know, add value to client businesses and make money from it that way. That that’s the real goal is to make something super user friendly and make it affordable.
Lee: Yeah. And how are you going around building this and launching it as well? Because that’s always something of interest. I know a lot of people in the community, especially in agency trailblazer communities, agencies have access to developers and the very often coming up with new ideas and launching things. So we’ve had Frederick, who launched the PageSpeed leads recently, his service for agency owners to attract people with, um, page speed tests, etc.. How are you going about the planning, development and the launch of this? Because let’s face it, you are a small company compared to, say, Basecamp, who can launch a massive new product whenever they feel like it. How are you going about launching this?
Adam: Yeah, so this has been a little bit self-funded. So right now at time of recording, I know this is not going out for about four weeks, but every time we are recording, which is the 1st January, it’s been self-funded up until now. We have a pre-sale going live tomorrow, which is the 1st of February, and that’s basically going to fund the other sort of 60% of the development, 50% of the development. Yeah, but right now we’ve got basically a fairly functional front end demo of the platform working because it’s a standalone SaaS platform. But what we’re doing is we are tying it exclusively to WordPress for now. Yeah. And that’s been a recent change just based on the tech really. And to do what we want to do and to make it as user friendly as possible. We’re basically going to have like a plugin that you just use our API to connect to, and it just allows us to connect to the website easier. So no one has to fiddle around with JSX snippets and all that kind of stuff.
Lee: Yeah, that’s a lot easier, isn’t it? Yeah, like albatross have that as well. Now where you just put in an ID number and then albatross does the rest, you know, for tracking the visits to your website etc..
Adam: So yeah, it’s become more popular and it become the sort of right move to do, not just for users as the platform, but actually end users of the website as well. There’s less impact on load speed and that kind of stuff. So it was the right move. So yeah, we’re tying exclusively to WordPress. Like I say, we got the demo done. We just haven’t got the tech guts done, which is going to be funded by the pre-sale. So yeah, it’s kind of honestly like there’s been a lot of learning as I go. Like, I know a lot of SaaS owners that’s been fantastic to pick their brains, but there’s also been a lot of winging it and doing things my way out of either brilliance or stubbornness. Um.
Lee: I’ll say brilliance. Let’s go for that.
Adam: Let’s go with that one. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s been you know, so yeah I think things are progressing really well though. So we’re only selling 25 licenses to the presale which are lifetime licenses. And then after that we’re just going to be doing general public sale, which is going to start at $27 a month. So like I said, we’re certainly hitting that affordable price point for people.
Lee: Yeah. That’s fantastic. What I’ve always loved is the democratization of the internet is the fact that, you know, everyday Joes. I know your name’s Adam, but anyway. But you know, everyday people like you and me can we can build an audience. We can build a product. We can add value to the world by creating something from our minds, as it were. An idea that we’ve got make it a reality for not too much money, and then add that value to the world and allow people to use it. So, you know, being able to create this podcast is wonderful for me. It’s it’s allowed me to build up an audience through the internet as opposed to in the olden days, I would I would well presume I would have had to have started in a, in a garage and then ended up finding funders to invest. That’s how Apple started, isn’t it? You always need funders and it takes time. And oh, it’s just, you know, whereas nowadays you can come up with an exciting new idea like you have self-fund some of it because the cost of development is is never as high as it used to be, and also then get other people involved. Now you are being very honest as well, which I love is the fact that you are looking for founder investors, as it were. So those are those founder members who will presumably is it a lifetime deal you’re offering those people? Yeah. To help you get that fund. So it’s like a go fund me, except you’re doing it yourself. And in return they will have access to it forever.
Adam: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They basically get a lifetime deal. And they get loads of features and benefits from being an early founding member or having faith in the product and the idea moving forward and trusting the roadmap. So yeah, they get a lifetime deal for $397. It works as.
Lee: And does that mean when you’re huge, you know, those however many people will be like, oh, is that all of your global parties and in pictures with you having beers and stuff like that? Yeah, I.
Adam: Certainly hope so, because.
Lee: That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Yeah, actually on that is that is that limited then like, I mean are you just happy to have as many founder investors or have you got a number you have to hit before you launch? Or what’s your plan there?
Adam: Yeah, no, it’s only 25 when you’re selling 25. Right. And that’s because that’s roughly the finances we need, including some extra for myself. But more of the fact is it’s kind of a number that’s sustainable business wise as well with, you know, there’s plenty of people that go down the route of cheap lifetime deals and sell it to hundreds of thousands of users. But that’s not really what I’m looking to do. So 25 people that are willing to see the future of the products and, you know, get on board and give give that early feedback is what we’re looking for really, so they can help shape the platform to yeah, to what it should be and that that’s why it’s priced the way it is as well, because you want people actually to be engaged with me and to give that feedback. You know.
Lee: I think that’s really wise what you’re doing as well, because the, the other, I guess the negative of just saying, hey everyone, get in. Um, now, whilst it’s free for life, that creates a problem in its own right, because if you’ve got 1000 people on your system, that means now you’re having to invest more money in your system to support all of those people. There’s a lot more support tickets, whereas keeping it as a community of 25 people that understand this product is going to take a bit of time to develop, but they will have the ability to help guide the direction of the plugin. But equally they know. So I called it a plugin, but the service, but also they know that there’s only 25 of them, so they’re not in any danger of you becoming overwhelmed with too many signups with, you know, worrying about the hardware, not being able to cope with the amount of demand. Because actually, this is, you know, this is a a small group of people who are helping get this off the ground. It’s a way of investing in a tool that’s going to add value to my business in the future, etc. I’ve seen a few Appsumo products, for example, who have done these big launches and sold lots and lots of licenses, and then the platform has since then slowed down because it’s it’s there’s too many people on the platform. I won’t name names of the software, but I used to use the software. They did an Appsumo deal, which kind of annoyed me actually, because I paid full price. But anyway, they did the deal and then and the system just ground to a halt because they had all these thousands of users who jumped on board and it was awful. So. And again, I’ll mention this was this was a couple of years ago now. So it’s no one will know what it is. But, you know, it’s just I like what you’re doing there. I think that’s a very wise move. So if you are thinking folks of of launching anything, I think this is a wise move, you know, put a, a, a decent price in there that’s going to help you fund whatever your idea is so that you can deliver that. It avoids a lot of those pitfalls of too many users hitting you at once, etc.. And also you’re creating a very small community. It’s almost like a it’s like a tight knit mastermind, isn’t it, of people who are invested in this, in this tool with you.
Adam: Exactly. Yeah. We’ve got private slack set up as ready as well. That’d be one of the benefits. They’ll have access directly to me, a private slack channel. And that’s where they’re going to get sort of updates of all the other stuff before anyone else.
Lee: And then presumably then after maybe six months or a year of testing all of that, you’ll then open up to the public and it’ll go from there.
Adam: I have a lot shorter time than that. We’re literally going to have we’re aiming as the rate of current development and provided the presale goes fine, which is no reason we shouldn’t be judging by the early feedback we’ve had. Yeah. So we’re actually probably around the time of this podcast launch. I think we’re hoping to have this like the 1st of March we set in. We.
Lee: Well, well, I suppose you’re you’ve already done quite a lot of the legwork anyway, haven’t you. Yeah.
Adam: So yeah, I think this podcast goes live the 1st of March. So we’re hoping to have the platform ready sometime in March. April time. Yeah. You know a push. Yeah. We’ve got sort of a solid roadmap with sort of space for hiccups as one would expect.
Lee: Yeah. And equally, you know, this is a new product. Again, you’ve been very honest about the launch. If you decide you need an extra month, your founder members are happy because they’ve already paid. And in fact, they’ll have already all joined before this episode goes live. So, folks, this is not an advertorial for family members. No. Yes. I’m just interested I’m intrigued in how we launched it. I think it’s a very clever idea, and I think I wanted to share it with everyone listening in case they were thinking, how can I launch my next idea? But yeah, if you then decide your founder members are still happy and people who are waiting on the waiting list, they can just salivate some more because they’ll they’ll be able to get access in when you’re ready and you want to go live when it’s ready because you don’t want them to have bad experiences either. Because obviously, you know that feedback is very much that referral is very much a part of your ongoing growth, isn’t it?
Adam: Exactly. Yeah. If we’re not live by the time this goes live, which we probably won’t be quite there yet. The website should have a sign up for a waiting list to be informed of all the updates anyway.
Lee: Absolutely. That’s fantastic. Well, I’m absolutely intrigued. I’m honoured to have been part of those early conversations where you got a few of us on a call and picked our brains on it to be a friend mate as well. Always honored to have you on the show and really, really loving your openness, your honesty and your transparency and just coming on the show a teaching us about split testing. But be also being honest about how you’re going to launch this, because I think it’ll help a lot of the people who’ve reached out to me asking for advice on how to launch a product. And I’m like, well, you’re asking the wrong guy. So yeah, thank you very much for sharing everything. Folks, if you want more information on Split Hero, you can find that over on Split hero.com as well. Don’t forget to go and check out Adam’s inspirational episode of episode number 111. We recorded that on the 5th of January and 2018, back when I didn’t have a full head of hair. But that’s episode 111 and we will make sure there is a link in the show notes as well to Adam’s, uh, other business profiles and social media links and all of those other crazy ways that you can connect with the cool dude. And he really is a cool and a lovely guy. So, Adam, thank you for your time. I think I want to kick off the show now. I’m gonna get off going.
Adam: Yeah. I’m off.
Lee: Yeah. Go on, get off love. Yeah.
Adam: Take care.
Lee: See you mate. And that wraps up today’s show. Now, if you’ve not got your ticket for the Agency Transformation Live conference, then you need to grab it ASAP. Because the early bird rate is disappearing in a very few short days. So check that out. Over on Agency Transformation dot live, you get to hang out with me, with Troy Dean, with Chris Ducker, with Paul Lacey. Of course, Paul Lacey, I mean, he’s everywhere, right? He’s even at Agency Transformation Live. You are gonna learn how to solve the next problem in your agency that you need to solve. Be that generating more leads, be that converting leads. Be that scaling The existing awesome agency That you already have, whatever that is, you are going to have a plan by the end of this conference And you’re going to Make loads Of amazing friends. So if you are not coming, please, please, please check it out. Agency transformation dot live and join people from literally around the world. We just had Shane buy a ticket from South Africa dude. So come on, let’s all get into Wellingborough, UK connect and have an amazing time agency transformation. Dot live.
