“Our Marketing Is Up Fog Creek” And What We Did About It
blog.fogcreek.com
blog.fogcreek.com
FogBugz is a complex B2B product fueled by recurring revenue (either subscriptions or maintenance).
It's not diet pills or a self-help book.
Most (all?) companies find that the long-form, "Tim-Ferris-style" landing page converts better for impulse sales. But does that work well for non-consumer products?
My fear would be that if you 2x or 3x the top of the funnel with landing page optimizations, you run the risk of attracting the wrong kind of customers. Customers who initially signup and pay, but don't become long-term repeat customers at the same ratio as those who converted on the old landing page.
I would be curious, Patrick, if you're planning on looking at the lifetime value of these conversions, or if the scope of your project with Fog Creek was limited to lifting the number of initial installs.
(Oh, and like everyone else said: great job, great writeup, and thanks for sharing!)
We're also going to be publishing a lot of good stuff in the coming months, so if there is a particular topic you'd love to see covered, we'd love your feedback.
Interesting article. Thanks (to both you and Fog Creek) for writing it up!
That depends where you're standing.
His methods and communication are definitely top of the scale though.
I think that Patrick did an awesome job with Bingo Card Creator, but Joel didn't hire the guy because he manages to make $30K in software sales a year. That's not an impressive number for software sales in itself. Plain and simple. Patrick is however an impressive guy when it comes to the specific set of skills he has, so it just makes sense for him to capitalize (possibly far more than Bingo Card ever could) on that.
The absolute figures might not shock you, but I consider the growth rate very impressive!
Luckily, Google does a pretty good job these days of sending you to internal pages for entrances when appropriate to demonstrated user intent.
The notes on the specific testing and implementation was great, but also the general tone of the piece. It can be hard to write about marketing to an engineering audience while honoring an engineering-driven culture.
For instance -
> FogBugz exists to help software developers write great software, but it also exists to pay the rent. This means that we have to actually consummate transactions on our website. This was previously delegated to the curiously named “Details” page. It had been designed primarily to explain to customers the difference between FBOD and the downloadable version of FogBugz. Sadly, this ended up being quite confusing.
Covers why marketing is needed in an extremely straightforward way (...it also exists to pay the rent). Then, it logically follows the page that converts needs to be easily accessible. And then, the notes here and elsewhere that non-technical people are often hitting these pages and getting lost trying to decide on the tradeoffs.
Great piece. Learned about the specific measures you took, but also a lot of meta-learning about how to present things well. Extremely straightforward, logical, acknowledging and honoring the engineer culture, while also noting that marketing needs to be part of the process to pay the bills and get the product in users' hands.
What I still remember from that page was : 1) Hand-made 2) Scarity (in a good way)
I just checked your website and 30 seconds after I don't remember anything about it.
The challenge is how do you add more products while keeping complexity to a minimum. We still want to have a clear message to someone that lands on our page but now they have more options as to what they can buy on our site. I guess it is a bit of a trade off.
When I do the test myself on your website :
1) REX RAY DODOCASE 2) DODO Case - Protects From Extinction 3) Couldn't tell in less then 5-10 seconds
Is that really what you want me to remember ? Also, my comment apply to "Acquisition", repeat customers is another matter.
PS : Sorry for my poor grammar/syntax, english isn't my first language.
I'm really glad Fog Creek hired you so that the rest of us could all learn a little something.
I know you were involved in the Fog Creek side of things and not the Stack Exchange side... but that actually make it more interesting for me since I expect your ongoing series of blog posts will cover as much as possible of Fog Creek-related stuff.
Or possibly because the free trial is pointless if you can't afford to pay for the real thing after it ends.
I absolutely will not start a free trial for a product I don't know the price of.
This may be one of those things though where normal people see the word "free", go "oooh lollipops!" and click.
I recently had to decline a free beta account for a cool, pre-launch web service because the company behind it had no idea how much it was going to cost once it launched.
We'll iterate further on it. One of the challenges is that you can swap out text as quickly as I can write it and you can get an image crafted in a day, but doing a new video is a Project with a capital P.
If you're reading this, you probably will never give FogCreek a dollar. That's the hard truth of the matter. We literally give the product away to startups (Student and Startup Edition, free forever for 2 users) because a) in aggregate startups demonstrably don't spend appreciable amounts of money on this, often preferring OSS or "we can totally duplicate that 100 man-years of development in a weekend" and b) dedicated effort at making sales to you doesn't make any sense relative to dedicated effort at selling 20 seats to an insurance company in Idaho.
But do we care about the community liking us? Oh heck yes. The average reader of HN is very link rich relative to e.g. the project manager for the IT team at an insurance company in Idaho. Producing stuff which you like enough to link to gets us higher on the Googles and thus into the line of vision of people who can spend more money on bug tracking than many startups spend on everything. Similarly, if you feel good things about us, you might recommend us internally to someone who has ability to make decisions about which product to purchase.
FC knows that FB is a tool that will show itself after a long time (hence 45 day) trials. When we start using FB our company was only 2 people now we are 9 and also we are a paid customer of FB.
For these reasons I don't want to believe that FC is not using channels like SO,Joel's blog as a marketing tool. That would be a waste of awesome free marketing.
I actually work for a remote insurance company that would really benefit from FogBugz :)
(but I have fairly limited influence and no decision power)
What great news! I've been using the EpicWin iPhone app for issue management and DropBox for source control up to now. Every time I thought about it for any length of time, I'd get really nervous. :)
Signing up right now.
Edit: Also, this made me so happy, I signed up for HN, after lurking for over a year, just so I could say so. Now that's great marketing.
Anecdotal evidence against the assertion that people reading this will never give FogCreek/Atlassian a dollar: we will.
Edit: I guess it could also be 'trusted' in the past tense.
Thrilled with the article, and I think like many on HN thrilled to see patio11 killing it. Cheers, Patrick.
I know that you are a rails guy and they use an MS stack. Any friction there? Were they able to use your A/B framework or did they have something on their own stack?
Edit: Nevermind: http://blog.fogcreek.com/how-to-do-ab-testing-using-google-w...
I enjoy Rails a lot more than I enjoy .NET, but give me some credit: looking at new languages doesn't cause my brain to throw a WTFCodeIsCamelCasedException.
By the way, Fog Creek isn't strictly a MS shop. There is a lot of "best tool for the job" going on, including e.g. Python being used as utility glue.
I should start a How To Make Sure Your Blog Does Not Die Horribly consulting business. And it will consist of disabling Apache KeepAlive, and then chanting arcane incantations in Latin about caching for the next hour to make people feel like they were really getting their money's worth.
I keep waiting for Balsamiq to move their web product out of beta. I've seriously been waiting a long time! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161642
"That worked very well for many years, but recently it hasn’t been the slam dunk it has been in the best."
Should this be, "it hasn’t been the slam dunk it has been in the past"?
But if you're trying to guess how sore the marketing team's hands are from high-fives at the moment, here's an easy math exercise: make a guess as to how many digits of sales FogBugz makes in a year. Pick a number for a single successful A/B test -- I suggest 5% for this one. Multiply.
Conversions are much more interesting. Unfortunately, that gets into the sensitive territory. There's at least three levels, right: how many more trials are we getting? How many more trials are we converting into paying customers at the end of day 45? How many users do those customers add (FB is priced on a per-user basis, so an account with 50 users is worth 10 accounts with 5)? Then of course there is the churn/LTV question.
We're obviously quite interested in these numbers. I don't know how much I can tell you about them specifically. How's about this: I wanted to increase trials by 90%. FC would have been happy with 10%. Actual results as of now are somewhere between those two numbers. Please don't binary search me in that range. The subsequent actions are also up, and we won't know about LTV/churn for quite a while yet, but early indications are good.
Regardless, great write up. I found it interesting and useful.
I'm calling shenanigans on the 352 votes, but I'm all ears to anyone who can explain why i'm wrong and what I missed.
How do you get that data?
You don't need a "home" link in the menu, that's what the logo is for.
Your menu should look like this:
Pricing | Features | Plugins | Support | other crap nobody ever sees
Then your most important money-making link-button "Try FogBugs" is below the fold for at least 30% of your visitors.
I think you really need to look at this and understand what it means:
http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
You might even want to display pricing right there on the main page.
They're selling developer tools, that changes things. And all that is part of your suggestion of "understanding what it means."