The Challenge Begins (Startup Series #3)
What you’re getting into: 6 min read. This article is not a resource for the Daily CSS Images challenge. Rather, it is an article of analyzing the progress of Daily CSS Images from the perspective of a creator. If you are a participant, you might enjoy being a fly on the wall to the “behind the scenes”. If you are a startup, entrepreneur, or solopreneur, this will be of interest and benefit to you in particular.
Affiliate Links: There is an affiliate link for ConvertKit, my awesome email marketing service.
Launch Week Total
Let’s cut to the chase this week and compare where we are at since our last startup series update.
Totals by end of the day Sunday, January 8, 2017
Subscribers: 126
Conversion Rates: 2.6%
Open Rate: 48.5%
Click Through Rate: 23.3%
Unsubscribers: 7
Totals by end of the day Friday, January 13, 2017
Subscribers: 889
Conversion Rates: 7.5%
Open Rate: 69.3%
Click Through Rate: 14.3%
Unsubscribers: 145
The Verdict
These results were far more than I had ever envisioned. The amount of subscribers to the challenge in one week exceeded my expectation for a couple of months. It was a very successful launch that did not require hardly any time or money. With open rates of 69.3%, tons of great feedback, and a solid community forming, I am very happy with the progress so far.
With that being said, there were questions I didn’t expect, and there are many places for improvement, specifically with conversion rate
In the rest of this article, I am going to be breaking down the bad and the good. Additionally, I will be going into some detail about my plan of action to address the bad, build on the good, as well as future plans for Daily CSS Images.
The Bad
Again, this was an amazing week for the beginning of the challenge, but there are definitely areas where I would like to improve.
The biggest area for improvement from a statistical standpoint is in the conversion rate.
If you notice, I don’t include traffic in my statistics and that is because I am not very concerned about traffic. This week I was able to do a webinar hosted by ConvertKit which featured Jack Born of Deadline Funnel. One of Jack’s points was the importance of focusing your efforts on conversions rather than traffic. This resonated a lot with my own assessments and my aim for Daily CSS Images. The reason being, focus on optimizing for conversions forces you to be spending efforts to create better content and have a better understanding of your targeted audience. Especially with Daily CSS Images, which I want to feel like a close community, it’s important to optimize for the people that will be good participants and contributors to our community.
I suspect that the reason for the low conversion rates is also related to some questions I received that I was not anticipating.
I started to receive questions like:
Where are the directions in the emails? Why is there not an image in the email? Are we only going to be challenged to make animals? What is the importance of pure CSS images?
The first thing I did to address this was write up an article that went into more detail about what the challenge is and included a FAQ addressing these questions. I then included this link into the welcome email of the challenge.
However, this is clearly not enough.
I really need to do a better job understanding my audience and communicating what the challenge is and why it is important. Moreover, I really want to be making the participants heroes.
What I mean by this is, I want participants to really feel as if this challenge is empowering them to achieve something great. For instance, this challenge will make them overcome their challenges learning CSS, it will give them design skills they didn’t know they had, it will spur their own creativity and personality, etc. Since these are the feelings I felt when learning pure CSS images, I want to pass the experience on to the participants.
With all the feedback, I think the challenge is achieving that well, but that needs to be communicated through the landing page to increase conversions. I plan on addressing this by hiring a professional copywriter.
Other than that, there is not much bad to say about this week. Now let’s discuss the good and actions I took that I think produced these great results.
The Good
Clearly, there was a huge spike in subscribers. We had 140 subscribers on Monday, 380 on Tuesday, and 124 on Wednesday.
I admit I have to do a better job of analyzing the incoming sources of our subscribers, but I do have a very good idea:
- Participants’ pens being selected to the front page of Codepen
- Continued share of A Beginner’s Guide to Pure CSS Images and other posts
- A lot of users who are also participating in #100daysofcode
- Organic Twitter reach
These subscriptions are great to see, but the biggest highlight is seeing the community that is forming around the challenge.
Those doing the challenge daily have all had a lot of excitement and enjoyment throughout the challenge. Not only have they been sharing all of their work with a lot of enthusiasm, but there’s been a lot of people liking, retweeting, and commenting on tweets of other participants. This is what I love to see. It makes it is really rewarding not only for me but everyone who is a part of the challenge. I can’t wait to see how it all develops.
Another big payoff has been not automating our Twitter account. While making the Twitter account automated might make things easier and be something cool to add to Github, I decided to monitor and respond to the tweets myself. I have Tweetdeck open the entire day.
Each time someone posts, I manually like, retweet, and usually send an encouraging comment. I think this is one reason for all the wonderful feedback.
Lastly, I decided to create a portfolio template for all participants so they could keep track throughout the challenge and have a portfolio by the end.
I think this adds a lot of value and purpose. Hopefully, it builds on an experience of being a journey and not just a daily chore in your inbox. I also included this in the welcome email with some good feedback so far.
Future Plans
As I mentioned I would like to hire a copywriter to touch up the landing page. I also redesigned the landing page to show a bit more of the challenge off, while still trying to keep it fairly clean and simple.
I am contemplating if I want to get some assistance with the social media it might start to eat at too much of my time.
I am also trying to come up with ideas to extend the challenge. I think there is a very good chance that I will add another challenge for after the first 50-day challenge. If not another challenge, some way of offering more to participants after they complete.
Most importantly, I need to really consider monetization strategies. Running this has been really rewarding, but being able to monetize from this email list would help to have a budget to possibly do more with Daily CSS Images.
Conclusions
This was a very eventful week and I feel like I could have written a 10-page post if I wanted to, but hopefully this is short enough to not be a bore, but enough to be interesting.
If you have any feedback or ideas on anything I wrote, it is much encouraged and appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Cheers!
Mike Mangialardi
