Rethink your Startup Website: Make a Net, not a Funnel

This is actually quite a useful technique yet equally unknown method of figuring out product viability from your own user cohort.

The overall concept...

- Not sure if a some FizzBuzz feature is required on your site?

- Not sure if people are interested in your awesome newsletter series on Blue Widgets?

- And in any event, after you've created FooBar... What will the take up be if you add it to your site?

Well, before you spend 4 days coding your new and exciting product, only to find out that no one actually wants to use it... do some market research on your own visitors!

How?

Easy... put the feature on some of your sites pages and purposefully 404 it, and when they click through, record the event.

Just provide some message saying "Ooopsey, looks like we are having some problems!".

Run the test until you are sure that either: it's working, or it's a total flop.

Guess who's already doing this? TripAdvisor. Listen to Kaufer explaining how at TripAdvisor they purposefully 404 their users into figuring out if something is worth doing.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/22/founder-stories-tripadvisor...

This isn't an either / or decision for a company. It makes sense to create a net if you're early in the lifecycle of a company or product—before it's reached product/market fit. Once a startup has reached product/market fit, however, creating a funnel and A/B testing the hell out of it is probably a good idea.

To use an example from your post, now that you know what people are looking for (and how they're behaving) on your paystub page, you can begin to tweak the design, layout, and flow of that page to optimize whatever it is you want to optimize.

With the above in mind, "make a net, not a funnel" is another way of saying "don't optimize prematurely".

>> Confused about how so many people could visit and still I was clueless about what they wanted, I logged on to the Hacker News IRC channel and asked the room "Can anybody help? I have a site I don't know what to do with."

There is a Hacker News IRC channel? Anyone know the details?

How do people react to fake buttons? I'd suppose it makes them more annoyed. Isn't that counter-productive? Or is it worth the risk?

In the article, OP wrote about Facebook: "They didn't want you to do anything but what you wanted to do naturally, they just wanted to pay close attention and help." Does OP or anyone else have specific examples of what Facebook did in their early days?

Traditional A/B testing assumes that there is one goal, conversion, and you tweak one thing at a time to reach that goal.

This has the same end-point, make something people want, but the methodology is completely backwards. Cover all the bases, provide all kinds of chances for users to do stuff, then figure out what your goal should be.

Interesting to see what some more experienced start-up guys think of this.