The one position every startup needs- Secret Weapon #2 | Hacker News Reader

The one position every startup needs- Secret Weapon #2

blog.appsumo.com

30 pointsthiele21 comments

What I loved about this article was the ending. By posting the sample job application it removes this article from a 'hey you should do it' to actionable direction on how you can do this.

Love to hear any comments or feedback about what you guys think.

nice work finding nick. Has he had an success yet?

It's interesting where about 80% of our test don't produce any significant results. One test nearly doubled our conversion of email and another one that is on-going now has done about a 30% increase.

The two biggest surprises to me so far:

1- About 80% of tests are producing results that don't show increase / decrease

2- Assuming things will work better is completely off. I was convinced my lightbox idea from the article was easier for the user but turned out it was annoying.

One thing is a balance of making things too annoying vs getting features that help us grow. An on going challenge of always trying to do right by our visitors and customers.

So essentially you allow the new guy to work on the marketing side of the site without fear of "breaking" any of any critical backend functionality? I assume he was able to get started fairly quickly (not much to learn besides some html and css).

I love the thought of A/B testing. But like you said, until I hit that 100/$1000 threshold, I still need to work on a lot of other things besides conversion rate (i.e. marketing.)

Looking forward to secret weapon #1.

Yea, he's not excused from checking in crappy code but he can basically push out any feature idea he has.

We have a master list of things to test, we prioritize weekly and pick the ones every Monday that he wants to do.

What kind of a/b testing tools are you using? Homegrown? Optimizely?

Homegrown at this point. Nick built it :)

We were using kissmetrics, google site optimizer and google analytics. All great tools but as we are growing we didn't like the delay in the data and didn't trust all the data integrity.

He is thinking of open sourcing our optimization engine at some point in the future.

Any interest?

I'm interested.

i'm interested, noah.

i'm interested too.

Definitely interested, Noah!

Interested for sure.

Would definitely love to see this as well.

I want that!

Interesting way of approaching a/b testing. The core offering is in place so having a college intern just test as many things as humanly possible seems like palatable to any founder/exec. Might have to try this...

I used to a/b test titles and all this micro stuff. Total waste of time but great mental porn. The global improvements from those tests are so miniscule it's not worth it.

Having my co-founder available for only limited time a week and tons of yelling from him have greatly improved my prioritizing ability.

how did you find nick?

He interned at my previous startup.

Yeah, back at my last company we added 1 outside the box feature to the site and it increased per page conversion 50%, this was after years of rigorous optimization. It's always interesting what lateral thinking can do.

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