

Ask HN: I openly dissect my workshop planning efforts. Pls, destroy my ego. - mikegreenberg

Hello HN.<p><pre><code>   def tldr(): 
      (return 'A shallow attempt at casual humor to
      engage(bait) HN readers into reading my dissection for 
      a promotional landing page. The subject is an Arduino
      Hands-on Workshop It's not converting very well and 
      want experts to rip my approach to shreds.')
</code></pre>
I'm usually at the providing end of this exchange, but I am a student myself. I don't know everything(anything). So I humbly place my vanity on the shelf and expose my tender underbits for public rhoshambo-ing. If you promise to go easy on me, I'll try to make this beneficial/educational/entertaining.<p>I'm organizing my first group workshop. It's about learning to program and use the Arduino. The motivation here is to grow the technical community in South Florida. I organize an event in South Florida called Hack and Tell. (Imagine a grown-up version of show-and-tell for technophiles.) I can attract a pretty reasonable crowd but it's tough to find people to present interesting (or any) topics for the community. My hypothesis is that people feel the proverbial bar for presenting a project is higher than they are able to jump. So I want to give the local community something interesting to show off and motivate them with projects to present. I intend to dissect my marketing/promotional efforts in public in hopes the HN community would critique my approach?<p>With this workshop, I'm focusing my efforts on the 18-30 Male market with sparse discretionary funds (low budget). So I priced my event to keep my margins as thin as I could while still keeping this a viable proposition to invest my time into. To be clear, what makes this a viable proposition is breaking even on my tangible costs and netting enough cash to not completely bottom out my savings account while I take attention away from paying work. This is in return for connecting and enriching a portion of my community and generating some clout among my peers.<p>Before approaching this project, I did a little talking around to get an idea of how well this event might fly. I thought for sure I had at LEAST 5 strong tickets sold (without breathing) and while these people were very likely of converting in the first place, even a few who were more "luke warm" felt interested and might put down reasonable money for such an event. (Of course, seasoned vets know that words != actions. So I still take this with a grain of salt.) But I think this is pretty reasonable validation and move forward.<p>I'm compiling information from various sources who do an excellent job organizing this knowledge while putting my own rose-colored filter on communicating the content. Along with access to local experts and creating a really creative experience, this is the bulk of the value proposition that I'm attempting to sell. So I've created a promotional site to anchor my marketing activities and funneling all traffic through. (http://hackthisarduino.com. Thanks to bunsen for throwing the design together.) The website is the point I direct all my marketing efforts toward since it's a property I control and can monitor click-through for.<p>My approach with this is a semi-long form sales pitch. Keeping details succinct and straightforward while still "speaking" to my target market was the objective here. I've tried to minimize the amount of distractions (other links and content which doesn't support the value proposition) while focusing the visitor toward clicking the "Sign up" link to the right. I've purposely omitted any prices to help judge the actual interest in the workshop and isolate that interest from the cost-benefit analysis they'll do when faced with the price. This has the added benefit of controlling my pricing on one page and being able to do A/B testing to different price pages if I ever wanted to get that anal and had the extra time (probably won't be worth the effort). So far, conversions from the homepage to the pricing page are around 26% of about 250 visitors. I'm pretty happy with this but it could be better.<p>From here, I manage my registration/payment via Eventbrite. (http://hackthisarduino.eventbrite.com) Not sure how much the processor is influencing the funnel as most of the registration process is hidden from my analytics. My only option here is Google Analytics and they capture surprisingly little (helpful) information. If anyone has insight on properly using Google Analytics with Eventbrite, I'm all ears. I'll probably make my own registration page with Stripe on my next try. Needlesstosay, it's been pretty pitiful from here. (Two full packages sold.) I expect a few more, but have a personal goal of at least 10 people. (I have an awesome space to fill with about 40 in my wildest fantasy). My main challenge is getting this last leg of the funnel to convert. I'm essentially at the "???" step before the "PROFIT!!!!" and feel like I'm hitting the right points. It's making me second guess my validation, but I'd like to bring this to you (HN) for a second opinion.<p>As far as promotional efforts, I am highly involved in the local community and have taken several steps toward promoting to my market. Local programming meetups with verbal mentions, some tech talks with a nice plug at the end (My deck: http://nobulb.com/project/appliance_whispering/), inclusion in newletters (StatupDigest, RefreshMiami, event calendars, etc), friends, family and professional colleagues, social networks (G+, Twitter, FB, Meetup), email mailing lists, a few discussion lists and forums, etc. I've attempted to provide incentive for referral traffic ($20 for anyone who refers a sale...unfortunately, this is manual and may be creating too much friction for people to take advantage of). And early bird pricing which reduced tickets down to my cost (which was when my only sales happened) which was announced via the majority of these channels.<p>I know this was a lot to chew on, but I would LOVE any feedback or thoughts you have on my approach. Happy to discuss any aspect of this.<p>Thanks HN!
======
cd34
Second time typing this, may have missed something. Got an expired link
message.

USP - Unique Selling Proposition. Why you? What pain are you solving? What are
they getting?

The very first thing should be:

Come to a four hour workshop and learn how to program an open-source
prototyping board and interface with sensors or LEDs. When you leave this
workshop, you'll be able to control an LED, read a sensor and control a device
from your computer. Don't have an Arduino? You can borrow one or buy one from
us.

The first thing I read should tell me precisely what you're offering - at that
point, I need to know more details.

If you're looking for 18-30, you're probably exposing them to technology they
may not have heard of. Why should they be there? Learn hardware, learn
programming, learn some basic electronics, learn hardware interfaces, etc.

You should attend if you want to: learn to control an external device from
your computer, want to control a series of LEDS based on inputs from sensors,
etc.

At this point, you've hit them with the first paragraph that tells them what
the expectations are and what they're going to learn. Now, you need to
describe What an Arduino is, the workshop you're putting on, etc.

* utensil misspelled

Make a list of the development environment requirements, libraries that they
may want to have handy, etc. You may have this in the confirmation email, I
don't know. You want to have a pre-check to make sure they all have what they
need - i.e. if you haven't worked with Arduino, show up 30 minutes ahead,
we'll plug in an arduino, load a quick program and make sure it builds and
runs. You don't want the first 45 minutes spent trying to debug and diagnose
getting them working.

I believe for the event price, you're outside impulse purchases and you had
too short a time from announce to workshop. I know you built it up in a number
of the Hack and Tells, but, from presented concept to event, I think your
timetable was too short - and is scheduled on an already busy (potentially
expensive) weekend for some potential clients. That said, are vistors from out
of town potentially interested in this versus the weekend on the beach in
SoBe? Cross promotion could work, but, that makes for one very expensive
weekend for part of your target demographic.

Referrals work, are hard to track, should be part of the event management
side.

For the Arduino thing we talked about, I suspected based on equipment costs
that I would need a 3-4 month announce to event and I still felt that would be
cutting it close.

Alumni, college groups, obviously those in computer or engineering classes may
be interested. I would think with your connections, you may have already
covered this.

Find potential meetup groups that have some crossover. Neil is part of a
hardware meetup - they may know students, etc. Perhaps the Android User Group
(since there is an ADK that uses arduino, there might be some crossover).

------
hluska
First off, a thousand apologies - I went to your site before I read your
reply. Consequently, you'll have a visitor from Regina, Saskatchewan polluting
your results....

I'm going to start by talking about some things you are doing extremely well:

1\. Great work coming here and asking for feedback. That takes a whole lot of
courage!

2\. I love how deeply you are dissecting your own work - you've got a great
attitude!

And now for some general questions:

1\. Are you sure there is actually demand for this? I know that this is the
ugliest question to ask (and the ugliest answer to ponder), but I suggest that
you start here.

2\. Are you sure that the people who you think will be most interested (males
between 18 - 30) are actually interested enough in this to convert? Have you
ever thought of targeting some retired people (especially engineers)? As an
example, I know an engineer who just retired who would sign up for this in a
second (if he lived in South Florida)

And finally for some criticism:

1\. I really like your website, but I have some problems with the text. While
the writing itself is great, I question whether 12px helvetica was the correct
choice. I also wonder whether your conversion rate wouldn't improve if you
increased the line spacing and decreased the total amount of text on the
homepage. With the web, the more words you have the lower the chance that
anyone will actually read all of them!

2\. I question the information flow - if I were in your shoes, I'd likely
design the information flow around a 'what is Arduino - what can I do with it?
- why should I learn about it?' pattern. Might be worth doing a split test to
see if that sort of flow has a higher conversion rate.

3\. Here's a picky little thing that I only noticed because I'm a little
obsessive compulsive about such things. Consider this scenario:

\- I live in South Florida (I wish) and arrive on your website.

\- I get down to the bottom and decide, "This sounds cool."

\- I decide I want to sign up for the newbie package, so I click "Signup Now"
(below the newbie package).

\- I arrive on the Eventbrite page and discover that 'newbie package' has a
quantity of zero.

Now I'm in some trouble. I can't remember whether I wanted the newbie package,
the auditor package or the loaner package. Do I hit back? Will that mess
everything up? Hmmm...I wonder what is happening on Hacker News....

All in all, great work throwing this event and if I lived closer, I'd
definitely take it. I hope some of this helps!!

~~~
mikegreenberg
All points are well taken. First, thank you!

Re: Validation of demand? No, I'm not sure of my demand. Further, I KNOW my
market is spread quite thin over the geographic area, however, this is one
giant test to begin with so I'm prepared for demand to be non-existent. I've
hedged myself against this risk to be able to recoup as much as possible if
this tanks in glorious failure.

Additionally, my market (18-30 male) is not a explicit selection but is more
just representative of the majority of the groups I'm attempting to attract.
There are some channels I will explore that touch the retiree market which is
likely more profitable, but also harder to reach through the usual channels
I'm used to (online and grassroots meetups).

Re: Flow. I agree the format sucks. However, this version was just updated
this morning. This is what I started with: <http://cl.ly/3x1n1531162f2H1o1Q1Q>
Was this a step in the wrong direction, you think? I felt it was too sparse on
information and didn't provide enough for someone interested but too lazy to
get in touch to ask their burning question that's stopping them from
registering. Unfortunately, my personal bandwidth is tapped and can't invest
in a redesign to test against. Next event.

Re: Text. I'll improve the text rhythm and see about tightening up my copy. I
didn't think about the font-size with the design I was given, but it can only
help to fix it.

Re: Eventbrite signup fail. Yes, I know. Not aware of a way to do with
Eventbrite. There are a lot of things that are short-coming about their
registration system. Another reason I'm likely to roll my own and use
something like Stripe to process CC next time.

Thanks much for your thoughts!

~~~
hluska
I don't think this is what you want to hear, but I prefer the first version
(ie, picture2.jpg). While there are a few little copy issues, in general, it
tells me what I need to know without feeling intimidating. Your new version
felt intimidating - I knew I wanted to read it so I could help you, but I was
nervous to get started!

If you'd like to run your copy by anyone, I've been writing for most of my
life. And, my girlfriend is a much better writer than I am. Feel free to email
me (I'm pretty sure it is on my profile) and we would be glad to give your
stuff a read.

Best of luck - this event sounds very cool!!

------
duck
Overall I think the site looks great. Here is a couple things I would at least
A/B test:

* Putting the prices on the page. I hate not knowing how much something is going to cost and I think it can surprise people when they click through.

* Your linked slideshow is okay, but I think it might be beyond a lot of the audience that you want to reach. I would scrap it and...

* I think you need to add an example project or two about what you can do with the Arduino (like maybe this one - <http://j4mie.org/blog/how-to-make-a-physical-gmail-notifier/>). As a software guy this would "sell" me.

Good luck with it! I think you're onto a great idea and I like the "loan"
option to allow people to just play with one.

~~~
mikegreenberg
Wish I had some time for A/B testing. I'll probably keep the funnel as it is
now for purity's sake and consider including this in a better approach for
next time.

The sideshow was a bit technical, but it was made specifically for a tech talk
event where the demo was more 20-something programmer alpha-geeks. It was a
hit. But definitely not for the 18-30 low-income bracket. Agreed. Including
the slideshow and movie were last ditch efforts to build (or lose?) some last-
minute credibility.

Thanks for your thoughts!

------
edomain
BTW, the first event you do is always the hardest- remember Michael Arrington
had the first TecCrunch meetups in his backyard. Provide a quality event
regardless of size and build on its success for your next one

~~~
mikegreenberg
Thanks for the kind words. I'm certainly not easily discouraged. This is all
in the name of improving today instead of waiting for next time. Thx.

------
edomain
Anyone that puts themselves out there gets respect in my book.

I think the site looks good and Arduino is super cool- it is something on my
wishlist of fun things to do when I have some free time. Robots rule and
Arduino chips seem to be in lots of them.

If you are ever interested in coverage of your event (and we can get a writer
where you are to go) its exactly the type of story we'd run on
<http://tech.li> Feel free to reach out to us and best of luck

~~~
mikegreenberg
Love to take you up on your offer. Email inbound. :)

------
mikegreenberg
Ironically, I'm completely FUBARing my metrics by posting this, but I feel
I've collected a decent sample to justify the value I'd be getting. But, if
you get this far and want to help, please use these links so I can segment
this traffic from my results.

<http://hackthisarduino.com/?hn=true>

<http://hackthisarduino-hn.eventbrite.com/>

