Startup Unito.io has been quite successful with a single core product that is useful to people looking to connect different work management tools together. When we wanted to explore how to diversify product offerings fueled by the core Babylon API, I proposed a series of tests by launching the product well before we'd developed a single line of code for it.

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Starting with a homepage created in Unbounce with no developer overhead, we sent $1,500 of ad traffic (split over 3 different ad groups) to Ottoplan.com to see if we could get traffic to sign up for a tool that automatically helped people monitor and plan their teams' engagement by seeing who had been active on task tracking tools in the last 2 weeks.

The initial page led users to sign up and, after signup, they'd receive the following popup:

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/ee227238-372d-4113-94c6-656b89eec38a/ff_tracking_block.gif

Where we counted signup intent here as a sign that people wanted the service as we'd outlined it in the landing page.

Initial test results were decent—we had a 4% signup for the product on cold clicks from Facebook, so we decided to invest in a more thoroughly explained and designed product to see if we could clear 6% conversion rate that we figured made economic sense for app development. The new redesign was quite different.

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And included actual product mockups to help sell the idea.

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The idea behind Ottoplan had buy in from the entire C-suite at Unito, and was widely considered a key next project for the company to increase lead acquisition, diversify the core tech in the company and further the future of work.

So after 3 different campaigns which tested different value propositions and different ways to try to increase engagement & interest from cold leads, Ottoplan ended up never quite cracking 5.2% conversion rate, and this forced the senior management at Unito to rethink exactly what they wanted to accomplish with Ottoplan and consolidate more on core product instead.

For about $2,000 in freelance website development and $6,000 in ad buys, we managed to avoid spending months of man hours of labor and further marketing effort on a project that, while a really cool idea, wasn't one that we knew how to market effectively.