Today was a good day. Getting some stuff done that needed to be. Redesign of the provider page and a meeting with our friends/business partners. While the day seem to go by fast, it was a good day.
Spent the morning prioritizing the software development and doing some of the website myself. The software wont be 100% ready by the time we launch, but thats OK. I think its more important to start than it is to be perfect. We will have to delay some non-priority things like our referral program redesign. We will see what happens over the next couple weeks. September 1st is around the corner.
So we have always had a plan for a referral program. We tried to model Harry’s razors but feel far from it. So the new plan has a few goals.
1. Make it easier to sign up and share
2. Pay out people to share
3. Pay out people when their referral person uses the service
4. Find a way to use Branch.io for deep linking to add some personalization to the app download experience. (This was an option on Branch’s Youtube channel 8 years ago… we will need to research this more.
The new plan is $5 Amazon gift card to people who share it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Nextdoor, Reddit (this one may not be a good idea), Tiktok. $5 for each profile they share it on. Copy and paste the link, once we verify its done, we click a button and they get a $5 gift card for each one. This maxes out at one share per account type. So if a user shared on FB, IG and Twitter, they would get $15. To prevent manipulation, we should be ok because the user will have to download our app, log into the app using a phone number that is verified. Just thought about it, we will need to verify mac address or something to make sure its not several accounts on the same phone… better write that down.
Marketing – not our thing. We are reaching out to some local companies and see what they have to say. It will be interesting. In our business meeting we discussed a few different marketing strategies and it was up and down. I saw a video on Youtube (Upflip channel) where a lawn care company swears by postcard mailers. They have been using them for 24 years and they still swear by them. We had discussed these in the past but all agreed, no one ever looks at them. This lawn guy says its the contrary and the best way to reach a demographic over 50. After a bunch of discussion about mailers, we think we are going to try it, BUT we need something thats fun and outstanding that will separate our postcard from the rest. Something edgy, something funny, something like no other mailer would do. Maybe this could be one of those things that you wait to see what the next design is going to be. Like each year when a company puts out a limited time version of something. Would our mailer do better than other mailers response rate (stereotypically 1-2%) because we aren’t asking people to buy anything?
When we talked about marketing and what we felt were less likely to be effective strategies (mailers, billboards, radio ad, etc) I kept falling back to the idea. If these strategies didn’t work, why would companies continue to use them? They have to work. The question is, what is the ROAS. I think the biggest ROAS will be simply paying people to share Fix it Today on social profiles. I’d rather spend $5k on people sharing our business rather than the post office.
We are about to start marketing to service providers via Facebook. Not sure how well this will work but we have had a couple providers reach out from seeing the consumer ads on FB. The hard part is what to say on the image ad. I was talking to my wife and made a joke saying we should say something like “We would love to fill your hole” meaning the hole in their calendar with no appointments. Its edgy, its funny… the demographic of the trades industry should laugh. She thought we should as ChatGPT. What did they suggest? “You have an open slot? Let us fill it!”. You go ChatGPT.
