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So! We’ve been reading star spanking shiny awesome news from every media outlet imaginable that so and so got funding, so and so got more funding, so and so got funding as well, BLA BLA BLA. It has created this false reality among a lot of our startup friends that everyone is doing well except themselves. The truth is, there are actually a lot of really fun silly things that fail silently in every startup out there.
We feel there is a REAL need to tell the world that in reality, there’s lots of random things startups are trying that silently fail (and for comic relief).
In the spirit of sharing, we will start off the first of our FunStartupFails series with one from our very own startup — MomoCentral.
For the longest time, we wanted to deploy a Referral Scheme to our platform developers and designers. You know, something to encourage them to tell their friends to put in an application with us! And so… my co-founder Jason and I spent countless nights researching referral schemes. We read every Referral101 article out there, did a ton of calculations (honestly in the end we just simply hit a number) and came up with some MAGICAL number we think works. We thought it was the best thing ever!
And.. to accompany our awesome plan, we figured:
Hey! We should have a really awesome, beautifully decorated, beautifully designed email to accompany the announcement of THIS FREAKING AWESOME REFERRAL SCHEME WE HAVE!
And so.. we got our designers to go churn that beautiful HTML email in MailChimp.
Our designers even designed nice icons to be placed into the email! Check out some of these.
And after many additional countless nights of optimizing and testing the emails among ourselves, we decided to finally hit the magical “SEND” button on our email campaign! and we waited.. and waited… and waited..
After weeks and weeks of waiting, this is what we see in our Google Spreadsheet submission form (Yes! We used Google Spreadsheet. Hey, don’t judge us! It’s free and fast! :P)
See we have a grand total of 4 submissions! (oops I mean 3! First one is a test submission form entry from me). Woohoo viva la our “AWESOME” referral program.
We were wondering what went wrong. Was our plan such a failure?
First thing we did was check our email open rates on MailChimp.
Our email open rate looks pretty healthy with 72.3% of recipients opening our email. We are clearly performing WAAAY better than the industry average of 18%
Wow! Our email link click rate is 14.9%, waaaay higher than the industry average of 1.7%
What is going on! :(
In dire times like this, your best bet is to talk to the recipients themselves to understand what is going on in their heads. And so we did!
Here are some of the responses we got upon asking them about our referral announcement e-mail
Multiply this by manifolds. Yup, somehow people opened our mail and clicked around but barely anyone remembered the details. Some even wrongly remembered it as a referral scheme to get clients.
You know what’s weirder? There are many developers and designers applying to our platform after hearing about us from a friend, but their friends somehow did not use our referral system to do it.
In other words, we saved ourselves a ton of money. Haha! Just kidding but seriously, it shows people rather just tell their friends about us without using our referral system.
Lessons learnt:
- Sometimes fancy emails with too much text could be TLDR, leading to no one reading it
- Don’t spend too much time thinking and wondering if this is right. Execute and let the results tell you if its right ASAP, and learn from it
- Try sending plain text emails that look personal next time!
- Our “awesome” referral scheme is really not that awesome after all
- Maybe we need to find a more convenient way for users to access our referral form than through an email link
And so you have it! #1 of our FunStartupFails series. If you have any fun stories of your own or your friend’s to share, do send it our way at hello@momocentral.com!
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