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When we left off last week, I had done some keyword analysis on ideas for running a microbusiness. The most promising one was selling trivia questions to people who wanted to run their own trivia nights. I identified the holidays in February as a possible validation vector. But those are too far in the future. I wanted to validate the idea much sooner.

I had a realization just after I published last week’s blog post. The Super Bowl is coming up! So I redid my analysis. Keyword traffic around the Super Bowl spikes in the 2 weeks prior. The volume is high enough to be interesting. This is a great candidate for an initial test.

This means that I have a hypothesis. “I can profitably produce and sell trivia questions for major sporting events in the weeks leading up to the events.” But how I can cheaply validate my hypothesis? Some types of trivia lend themselves to existing marketplaces. “President’s Day Trivia” could be tested on a marketplace like Teachers Pay Teachers. But there doesn’t seem to be a marketplace for 2 hour bar trivia. And I’d be surprised if there were. So building a Squarespace site is my next best option with payments powered by Stripe. I could get this off the ground in days instead of weeks.

So I started signing up for a Stripe account. It hasn’t been approved yet. I can’t charge for anything until it is approved. Hopefully this will unlock soon and I will be on my way!

I also wrote out the Super Bowl trivia night. It took about 4 hours over 2 days. About half of that time was spent writing the rules and structuring the game. I have another 30 minutes ahead of me to create an Excel score sheet and validate that it imports into Google Sheets correctly, and I want to go through Stripe’s landing page copywriting guide and apply it to making the Squarespace landing page.

I’ve also started thinking about reducing the time it takes to produce a trivia night. I would want to make a way to generate a trivia night based on the questions and format. This sounds easy, and it would allow me to pay others to write the questions for me without distracting them with the trivia format. From there it would be possible to auto-generate some questions with an existing knowledge bank. This would allow me to gradually reduce how much I would farm out over time.

But that’s getting really far ahead of myself! I wouldn’t do any automation for weeks or months. A better question to ask myself is “What can I do to publish the Squarespace site as soon as possible when the Stripe account is approved?” And that means that I should be reading about landing page copy, making a score sheet that trivia jockeys can use, and finally building out a draft version of the site that I can publish the instant it can go live. Then I will document my process while the test is running. That hopefully means that my results would be repeatable if they are good.

How am I progressing towards my goal?

Make $100 of profit, not counting the value of my time, on a business idea by the end of March, 2019

My first business goal

I think I’m on track so far. I didn’t sign up for Stripe early because it was unclear if an existing market could validate my idea. But now I’m blocked on the sign up process! This feels like a minor unforced error. I’m not beating myself up over it. But there’s a lesson here: there would be no consequence to signing up and not using a Stripe account, so I should have done it early to have it in case I needed it. Next time!

There are positives too. I’ve identified an area where there is interest. I’m thinking of charging $14.99 for the test trivia, since it’s worth far more for a bunch of people to show up at a bar. So after domain + Squarespace + ads I’d likely hit this goal with 10 units sold. This could be a tall order. If both my clickthrough and conversion rates are bad, 4000 searches might only mean 2 sales. And that assumes that I’m selling something that people want! And it’s priced correctly! But it’s something to learn from. The real value is likely to either come long-term with a long-tail search strategy, or a monthly subscription model to people who run trivia nights.

Tune in next week, when I’ve hopefully started collecting clickthrough rate and conversion numbers for the site that I published!