The Yottled Journal – August

The Yottled Journal – August

It’s been about one month since we provided an update to our Yottled Journey so far.  We aspired to do it weekly…that was a lofty goal.  We’re going to try and give updates on a monthly basis now and see if this is more manageable.

If you’ve landed on this page and you’re a coach, we can’t thank you enough for helping us achieve this.  It’s because of you that we will be successful.  If we can help you in anyway, if this is confusing, you have questions, or want us to learn something from you, Trevor’s email is trevor@yottled.com and Will’s email is (you guessed it) will@yottled.com. 

What is this?

Will and I thought we would take the time to share what we’re doing from the business perspective.  What we’re learning each week, trying to do with our customers, and how we’re trying to make Yottled successful.

Who is likely to read this?

We would expect anyone in the tech industry to benefit from this blog.  It’s an update of what we’re trying.

Some context before reading further

Will and I are two people that want others to succeed. Our goal is to enable others to make money…and we want to make money too. We work full time at Cisco and StockX and this is a side project we work on during PTO, at night, and on the weekends. We’re investing our own money and time to make this as delightful as possible. We don’t know if we’ll be able to “get funding”, turn this into something profitable, or…who knows what…but at the very least…maybe someone else can benefit from our learnings.

What has been done so far?

Check out our previous posts:

• The Yottled Journal
• Launch +5 – 7/19

Metrics:

• Cost per lead (total): $16.24
• Percent of total calendars connected: 30%
• Percent of total stripe accounts connected: 10%

Goals:

• Goal for September: Start charging customers.  We are laser focused on getting something out in order for us to start evaluating and testing the payment flow.  In an ideal world, we would have 3 editions.  Good, better, best.  We’re going to launch with two and then build the third.  It’s more vital to us now to test and get data than wait and get no data.

Quick review of our metrics:

Our cost per lead has mostly leveled out.  We have up and down weeks, but we’ve found a happy place with our current ads, sign up flow, and offering at $16.24 CPL.  We expect this to increase when we start charging our customers for two reasons:

1. Our email entry form is going to be moved.  We’re no longer going to be allowing a customer to give us their lead information directly on the site.  Instead, they’re going to click a CTA.  Since the intake form has moved, we’re expecting drop off.  The options a customer will have are:
   1. Sign up for free
   2. Start a premium trial
   3. Buy the premium version now
2. Any time you make a customer make a mental choice, there is likely to be drop off.  Thus, we’re expecting less people to convert at the lead state but higher quality leads.  We’re currently estimating a $40 CPL and a 5% conversion rate to a paid product.  Average self service SaaS is around $50 CPL and 7% conversion rate to a paid product.

Our overall calendar connected rate has dropped.  We have been experimenting with so many different ways to get a customer onboard.  It’s not a surprise to us that it dropped due to our testing.  As we move to our paid product, we’ve settled on an onboarding flow for now that has seemed to optimize for connecting calendars and connecting Stripe.

What did we do last month?

Last month, we focused on several things:

• Feature: Help coaches maximize their time with their clients.
• Feature: Help onboard new coaches to the platform.
• Marketing: Knowledge sharing. 

Coaches were enabled to create group classes and the results speak for themselves.  Coaches that have created classes are making $94/hour and clients are paying $6 per class on average.  Compare that to the average coach making $20 per hour and the average class costing a client $30 to $36.  Coaches make more while clients pay less with more convenience.

We also prioritized new onboarding to help ensure Trevor and Will could stay out of the onboarding flow.  It is critical to our success that coaches are empowered with simple technology and can set up Yottled on their own.  We must be out of the onboarding process.  If we get involved, we’ve failed with simplicity.

Last, we’ve been finding success with knowledge sharing.  We have been hosting our own classes to ensure our coaches can find success.  It’s less about Yottled, more about connecting them with like people to hear about difficulties, struggles, and challenges with going remote.  Our goal is to facilitate a community of learning and empowerment.

What are we going to do in September?

Our goal in September is to get paying customers.  Since we have the luxury of self service, Will and I have been able to keep costs ultra low and hack this together during evening hours.  Paying customers are now a function of cost per lead, ad spend, and getting to that ultimate acquisition cost.

One of our biggest benefits is network effects.  While we’re not there yet, it’s a north star we can build towards.  Until then, our predicted customer acquisition cost is $40 cpl / 5% close rate = $800 worst case.  Wave the math wand…$66 per month for a 12 month pay back.  We think we can optimize a lot there…we have ideas about that elusive future 3rd edition…and of course the “enterprise play”.  

We’ll be back at the end of September to hopefully tout our first paying customer.  We could also burn a horrendous amount of cash and fail miserably.  Either way!  We’re having fun!

Best,

Trevor and Will