Last week

I wanted to test the idea that I could sell trivia night question/answer sheets for one-off events. I made a set of 18 Super Bowl questions and answers along with a set of rules. I was just waiting for Stripe to approve my application so that I could accept payments.

This week

I had a cold starting on Wednesday, and didn’t start feeling better until the weekend. That means that I didn’t start making progress until Saturday.

Stripe was still reviewing my application when the weekend started. I looked into other payment methods that can be integrated with Squarespace. They also accept PayPal business accounts. I happen to have one of these!

So I made a small sales site basically designed to try to just sell the Super Bowl trivia sheet that I set up. I then set up and started tweaking three Google Ads to get a cheap CPC while still showing up on qualifying searches. I haven’t had any sales since then. Here are the numbers

Impressions	1806
Clicks	81
Clickthrough Rate	4.49%
Visits	144
Conversions	0
Conversion rate	0%
Cost per click	0.50

OK! So, some positives and some negatives here. Let’s start with the negatives. The Google Ad console says it best:

Harsh but fair, Google! I have a few ideas for what the contributing factors are for not getting any sales. I think that all of them are at least partially right.

First, asking for somebody to pay money on an unfamiliar site that hasn’t demonstrated any value is asking a lot. In the past few months I’ve done a lot of reading on how SaaS businesses operate. Their primary goal is to get an email address that they can use to send marketing material. For instance, “Sign up for this 6 email course on getting a high-quality email list” or “give us your email, and in exchange we will send you this guide to having a killer landing page.” And the idea is that by having the email address, you have a way to keep reminding them that you exist. Plus, they are more likely to convert at the end of the 6 email course (since you have hopefully given them information that they find valuable). It’s not clear to me if this extends more to a consumer-minded market.

Second, the price is likely a factor. I was charging $14.99 for the trivia night. My theory was that it replaces 2+ hours of hunting down questions, and another hour of setting the rules. If the person valued their time at all, it would be worth it for them to buy the pre-bundled one. I just dropped the price down to 9.99 to see if price sensitivity mattered at all. I’ll report back next week! My instinct is that I’ll finish out the week without any sales, but I think it’s worth another $20 to find out if my conversion rate is “near zero” or “absolutely zero.”

Third, this is the first landing page that I’ve ever tried to build. As the Google Ad said, “the landing page experience is below average.” I will focus on reading resources for building good landing pages. I will also find landing pages of other small products to see how they develop the real estate they have.

It wasn’t all bad! The ads I ran successfully generated clicks. In my opinion, they were also clear about what I was offering. This means that I was better at identifying a need than I was at closing a deal. This tells me that this idea isn’t pure trash. Pursuing the trivia idea means that I must figure out another landing page strategy to work well with an advertisement like this.

Cash flow this week

It has cost me $82 to run this experiment so far. $40 for ads, $12 for the domain, and $30 for 1 month of a commerce Squarespace site.

What am I doing this week?

I have the Squarespace site for another 25 days. This means that I can save myself a second Squarespace setup fee by running a second commerce site experiment just by switching the domain. I also got my Stripe account approved, which is great! I’d rather accept Stripe than PayPal.

The most obvious second experiment that I can run is for Valentine’s Day trivia. I need to do some traffic sizing to validate that this is a good subject. For the sake of this blog post let’s assume that it is. My hunch is that this will be used in a school setting, as opposed to sports trivia which is destined for a bar. Keyword analysis would verify this by looking for phrases like “valentine’s day trivia easy.”

I will also spend time this week researching landing pages. copyhackers.com is probably a good place to start. I can also skim startupsfortherestofus.com and kalzumeus.com to see if they have any other advice. If the Valentine’s Day trivia starts to pan out, I can also try to see if there are other sites that sell these kinds of materials (trivia, bingo cards, etc) to see how they set up their offering. It could be that selling printable materials is the most important thing here.

I may also see if teacherspayteachers.com allows non-teachers to sell on their marketplace. It wouldn’t hurt to try to sell it through a second channel.