
“Our Marketing Is Up Fog Creek” And What We Did About It - patio11
http://blog.fogcreek.com/our-marketing-is-up-fog-creek-and-what-we-did-about-it/
======
portman
I'll be interested to see a longitudinal study in 6-12 months.

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!)

~~~
ssharp
It would seem pretty counterproductive for a web business that counts on
repeat revenues--and even more so for a company with a monthly recurring
revenue model--to not optimize CLV in favor of optimizing for short-term
gains. Even if Patrick's work was a one-off deal, I'd hope FogCreek will be
measuring lifetime value of these conversions vs. old customers.

------
patio11
Hideho everybody. I hope you like it. If you have any questions, I'm happy to
answer anything that doesn't breach a confidence with them.

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.

~~~
spydez
Today I learned patio11 does design consulting, and is not just the bingo card
guy.

Interesting article. Thanks (to both you and Fog Creek) for writing it up!

~~~
acangiano
I respect patio11, but his bingo card earnings are far from impressive. What's
impressive is the process he developed to optimize his earnings in a
relatively small B2C market. That knowledge and expertise, along with the fame
he earned by sharing them, is his most valuable asset. It just makes sense to
capitalize on it with consulting gigs.

~~~
rockncode
If you can earn 25k a year from a simple bingo app, put together a few more
similar apps, then you have a decent salary. And so what if you think if his
bingo earnings are far from impressive. That first sentence was unnecessary.

~~~
acangiano
I understand where you are coming from, but I can assure you that my first
sentence is not meant to be ill-spirited. Rather, it servers the purpose of
setting up the second part of my comment which reinforces how much "patio11 is
not just the bingo card guy".

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.

------
wccrawford
"You can also see that the See Pricing link attracts more people than the free
trial button, possibly because the free trial isn’t identified as being free."

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.

~~~
tptacek
I'll add the data point that I think this way too; the pricing is more
important than the free trial, to me, as part of the process for acquiring
software.

This may be one of those things though where normal people see the word
"free", go "oooh lollipops!" and click.

~~~
p4as
This is so true, software sites that invite you to call, just so you can get
some idiot to tell you about their "value proposition" and discuss your
"licensing estate" really get my goat.

~~~
tptacek
Well. Goat or no goat, for many software companies, this is the right
decision; a salesperson will do a better job of closing an enterprise sale
than a web page will, especially when the web page invites prospects to
disqualify themselves because of their immediate reaction to pricing.

------
tptacek
Do you _generally_ think --- gut take --- that a video of the founder on the
front page (kind of costly to make, timewise) will perform well? Or is Spolsky
just that kind of magnetic?

~~~
patio11
Gut take? If you had told me "We're an enterprise software company and a 3
minute video on our front page did really well, outperforming text and static
images.", I'd say "I'll buy that." The hour long video killing it? That
surprises me. This was one of a couple results where data said everything I
know is wrong.

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.

~~~
shuwu83
Do you measure how far people get in the video? People might click to hear
Spolsky, but not for the whole hour.

~~~
patio11
My understanding: we measure it (Michael Pryor posted a link below), at least
some people really do stay glued to the tube for a long time, and then they
convert like crazy.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
Here's a link to Michael's post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2588718>

------
spenrose
Fog Creek's marketing has always seemed to me to center on Joelonsoftware.com,
and then Stack Overflow, and also posts like this one. Unless I'm missing
something we are part of the target market. Now, I don't have a problem with
that, but it makes me read posts like this one (and this one:
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/11/16.html>) a bit differently.

~~~
patio11
You're missing something, but it's subtle.

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.

~~~
ageektrapped
Wait what? There's a free Startup Edition?!? I've been looking all over for
free issue management software that doesn't suck and here Fogbugz and Kiln are
free for little 1-man software shops.

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.

~~~
Confusion
Jira with Greenhopper is almost free: $20 for up to 10 users. It beats the
pants off of any open source solution. For us it won out over Fogbugz in the
trials. When we pass 10 users (there's currently 5 of us), we'll pay their
regular price.

Anecdotal evidence against the assertion that people reading this will never
give FogCreek/Atlassian a dollar: we will.

------
dlevine
The funny thing is that they just ripped off 37 signals' marketing page. Not
to say that this strategy won't work - just that the "redesign" involved some
heavy borrowing. I recognized it because I just used 37 signals' page as the
basis for a marketing page on my own site.

------
switch007
"Trusted by 20,000 organizations" - seriously? That is staggeringly amazing.
Does that really mean 20,000 are using FogBugz daily?

Edit: I guess it could also be 'trusted' in the past tense.

~~~
ZoFreX
It isn't really as compelling in the past tense - e.g. 'Sony: Trusted by
70,000,000 users'.

------
famousactress
I think Patrick is an amazing argument for bootstrapped entrepreneurship in a
way that I haven't really heard mentioned enough... The freshness of
perspective that comes from an incredibly bright person of one field (in this
case development) thrust into other roles (marketing, sales, web production)
seems awesome fuel for innovation and new thinking.

Thrilled with the article, and I think like many on HN thrilled to see patio11
killing it. Cheers, Patrick.

------
2mur
Great write up 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...](http://blog.fogcreek.com/how-to-do-ab-testing-using-google-
website-optimizer/)

~~~
patio11
We don't use Google Website Optimizer, which I won't recommend to anyone.
We're using a .NET framework that I won't name because we're probably going to
transition off of it.

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.

~~~
2mur
Thanks for the clarification.

------
m_myers
Wow. So much practical advice in there. I'd heard much of it before, of
course, but seeing it in action really helps cement it. I may have to read it
again to make sure I caught everything.

------
mashmac2
"Our Page Load Speed Is Up Fog Creek" And How HN Has A Slashdot Effect

~~~
patio11
The cause was... wait for it... Apache KeepAlive. For more details,
searchyc.com for [patio11 keepalive]. It kills more blogs than cancer.

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.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
...or just don't use apache unless you have a specific need otherwise. NginX
handles tons and tons of alive but idle connections gracefully, and will still
be snappier for users that want additional pages.

------
jsdalton
Is that Balsamiq you're using for mockups?

~~~
mhp
Yep: <http://balsamiq.com/products/mockups/fogbugz>

~~~
jsdalton
Ah, naturally.

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>

~~~
balsamiq
email me: peldi@balsamiq.com

------
pchivers
I think there is a spelling mistake in the article:

"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"?

------
jonknee
Results coming soon I hope?

~~~
patio11
There are a couple of specific results mentioned in that post. If you're
wondering about specific "Did it make them money and, if so, how much?", the
answers are "Yes" and "Fog Creek is owned by the Creekers, and like most
privately held companies they don't share revenue numbers."

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.

~~~
jonknee
Wasn't looking for revenue, but relative figures. Converting 2x over previous
site, 30% longer sessions, 50% less bounce visits etc.

~~~
patio11
Longer sessions and less bounces don't really matter to us. (They strike me as
easy to measure but of limited business utility. I can do a lot of things to
make your session longer -- re-bork navigation, for example. That won't make
folks terribly happy, either our customers or other Creekers.)

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.

~~~
jonknee
I am interested in lesser popular stats like session time and bounces because
it sheds some light on conversion differences. If you increase conversion and
decrease session time that means you have succeeded in getting out of the way
of people who want to give you money. If you increase conversion and increase
session time it's for a different reason (maybe you weren't providing enough
info before). Same for bounces--is the new higher conversion figure due to
enticing people who previously bounced or are you doing a better job at
hooking in people who were already more interested? I could go on, but I'm
already rambling.

Regardless, great write up. I found it interesting and useful.

------
StuffMaster
In my opinion software homepages should look somewhat like wikipedia pages.
Any software that tells me how awesome it is before explaining _what_ it is
quickly loses my interest. And using a grid with images in place of a list
really annoys me.

------
spaznode
I've used fogbugz, can't say I was very impressed with the product. Maybe they
need to spend more time on that and the product will market itself. Seriously,
this is a great example of the wrong way to view a product.

------
pbz
Not sure if know/care but the fonts you use look really bad when ClearType is
not enabled: <http://i.imgur.com/VmCR0.png> Looks OK in IE though.

------
brown9-2
Does anyone know in what capacity Microsoft is using FogBugz?

------
choxi
i thought this was a pretty mediocre post, it just had a few tips about how to
improve your landing pages (pretty well-known ones too).

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.

------
pitdesi
It's amazing that a one hour video performed best. I get that people want to
click on it more, and it IS obvious that putting a big play button would lead
to more views... but how far do they get and how does it impact conversion
etc?

~~~
mhp
Here's the hotspot info. It's kind of interesting. It is above average for
longer than I thought it would be: <http://i.imgur.com/KGPg0.png>

~~~
euroclydon
I saw that same graph on Khan's FAQ today. He was explaining that if there's a
lull in the video, then he works to make it more interesting at that point,
until the lull goes away.

How do you get that data?

~~~
mhp
Youtube gives it to you for free but you have to have enough views. It's under
"Insights" on the video and then "Hotspots".

~~~
michaelrlitt
We're working on a product that will be able to give you this data regardless
of number of views. Ping me if you'd like more info or an early access
account!

------
rorrr
Looking at the heatmap, "Pricing" and "Features" are your most clickable menu
items. For some reason you completely ignored it and put "Pricing" all the way
to the right, where 10% of the visitors can't even see it.

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.

~~~
encoderer
A very quick, no-research, gut reaction I just had to your comment was that
the numbers you throw out -- "30% of your visitors" -- assume that the
demographics of their visitors are inline with the demographics of the
internet as a whole.

They're selling developer tools, that changes things. And all that is part of
your suggestion of "understanding what it means."

------
lhnn
Are there recommended books for web design? "Funnel" is a foreign concept to
me.

~~~
js2
Funnel refers to the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_process>

~~~
jacques_chester
Drat, beaten to it. This is what I get for replying to 20-minute old copies of
a page.

