We launched Silicon Heroes 12 days ago (http://bit.ly/siliconheroes) which means the first wave of marketing has run its course. The first wave was strong – email marketing to ~1,500 people, #1 on Product Hunt books and 3 great PR articles written about us. This first wave powered us all the way to over $40K in the first week. Of course, since this initial burst of marketing activity was done, I needed to find ways to sustain the crowdfunding contributions or else growth would flatten out (since I’ve exhausted all my friends). I tried out 3 marketing ideas this past week and here’s what I learned from them over the past few days.

#1 – Facebook Ads

Wow, I’ve learned a ton about Facebook ads in the last week. First, I learned that the new Facebook pixel does not work with Indiegogo. This only took me $100 with zero conversions to figure out. Luckily that was essentially free money (it’s great to have friends at Facebook). After some back and forth with Indiegogo’s support, I figured out that the old Facebook conversion pixel will still work (though it limits what you can track). 

I then decided to limit Facebook ads to $20/day and I started running two types of campaigns. The first uses look alike targeting which looks at the 50 customers who have contributed to Silicon Heroes (that I did not already know) and then targets people with similar profiles. The second campaign just targets people between 18-50 who like tech (occupation or interest), comics (Marvel movies, comic books) and Girls Who Code or Code.org. My audience was about 5MM so I figured this was big enough. Here are the results:
Just targeting based on demography and interests resulted in ~$13 CPM and 0 conversions. Ouch. Using the look alike audience with some targeting resulted in ~$18 CPM with 2 conversions (from 21 clicks). This ad unit basically broke even. 

I spoke with a couple buddies who do a lot of Facebook ads. They were both surprised by how ineffective my ad campaigns were. They had a whole bunch of suggestions – splitting up my audiences into thin slices (between 100,000 and 200,000 person audiences) and then running a lot more campaigns (testing different combinations of creative, messaging and audiences). They also looked at my stats and quickly steered me away from mobile (which does not convert well on Indiegogo). Some great suggestions and I’ll try a whole new series of tests this week.

#2 – Content Marketing

I wanted to create unique content related to Silicon Heroes that was easy to produce and shareable. So I went on Upwork and hired a few artists to sketch famous entrepreneurs as superheroes. I then hired another person to use inspirational quotes from these entrepreneurs and make them into little shareable pieces of content for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Each piece of content costs me ~$7 and I’ve created about 50 (though I’ve only distributed 6 or 7 so far). See the image at the top of this post for an example.

My plan was to see if I could convince some of the famous entrepreneurs to tweet the sketches out. Wow…that did not work. Most entrepreneurs were flattered by the sketches but they so far have had zero interest in sharing the images. My guess is that they are worried about looking arrogant or vain for posting a picture of them as a superhero. No big deal. So I’ve just been pushing out some of the sketches from my own accounts and the Silicon Heroes accounts. 

Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten much reach with the images and it’s also difficult to measure the impact for some of the channels. Twitter gets the least interaction (1-2 likes per image) whereas Instagram gets the most (30-50 likes per image). Unfortunately, Instagram doesn’t allow you to embed links. You can put them in the comment, but they are just text (not hyperlinks) and therefore not trackable. So far, I’ve received no Indiegogo contributions via these images on Twitter, 1 from Facebook and I don’t know the results from Instagram. 

If there is a lesson learned here, it’s that I probably should have only made 5 or 10 entrepreneur sketches so I could have figured out early on that the CEOs weren’t comfortable sharing them. Without their boost, it’s been tough sledding on Twitter and I doubt I’ll see ROI. However, content marketing really tends to stack as you push out more content so hopefully I’ll see the same effect (and maybe ROI will come later).

#3 – Automated Twitter Marketing

I came up with this crazy idea to create a bot that would automatically respond to everyone who liked, replied or retweeted any of the content related to Silicon Heroes. For example, the article I wrote in Entrepreneur that described a little of the backstory for Silicon Heroes has been shared over 3,000 times. I could search for any time the link to that article had been shared and then I could automatically tweet the person who tweeted the article link with a message that says “Thanks for sharing. Did you know you can buy a copy of Silicon Heroes here…”. Great idea, but apparently this is difficult to execute without pissing off Twitter. I’m still working on it so if anyone has any ideas, I would greatly appreciate it. 

Chasm Not Crossed

It was a busy week of experimentation and I definitely did not figure out how to keep growth going for the Indiegogo campaign. We added about $3K in contributions during the last week, but sadly almost all of these contributions came from people that were emailed during the 1st week (so they weren’t attributable to the new marketing tactics). I’m going to continue experimenting with Facebook ads this week – smaller target audiences with more focused messaging. I’m also going to see if I can’t crack this Twitter bot and I’ll start sending out some cold email campaigns to people that like tech and comics. I’ll report back next week.

​Lesson #1: Email marketing works.

I sent out three email campaigns last week which generated a total of 170 contributions. I used SalesLoft to send every email from my own email address and so they could be highly personalized. The first was an email to 207 friends. These emails were each handwritten. As expected, conversion rate was very high as these 207 emails resulted in 109 contributions (53%). The second batch of emails was sent to 253 people and these were customized using 5 different variables and resulted in 45 contributions (18%). Lastly, I sent out emails to 1219 people that were not very customized and these emails resulted in 16 contributions (1.3%). Obviously, how well I knew the person dictated which email segment they fell into and this had more impact on conversion than any personalization.

I learned one really key lesson with email marketing. Send your emails in small batches and A/B test the messaging. I sent the first 207 as one big batch. I found out very quickly (from my friends) that I had made a small error – my click to tweet link was too long by one character. So, for the next set of emails, I broke them into smaller groups and sent them an hour apart. Sending the smaller batches enabled me to see people’s questions and feedback and then tweak little things in the messaging. I would up sending out 4 pretty different messages. By the time I finished sending the larger blast of 1219 emails, I had honed in on the messaging that worked best (based on click data) and fixed a couple of errors.

Lesson #2: No one in the press wants to cover your story until you are already successful.

I had sent out ~30 emails to bloggers and reporters tipping them off to the Silicon Heroes launch. I received only one nice email back declining. I was really fortunate to get an introduction from a friend to Entrepreneur and they were kind enough to run a byline piece on our launch day. That was the only PR piece covering the story at launch. I wound up emailing a few of the journalists on my initial list as we approached our goal at the end of Day 1 just to let them know we had launched, we were approaching our goal and that we were #1 on Product Hunt for books. Amazingly, Huffington Post wrote a nice piece and TechCrunch covered us the next day.

The lesson learned with PR is that no one wants to cover your story until it is successful. So it’s better to focus your energy on marketing channels you can control and then use PR as a boost. Also, PR is not a one shot strategy. With an Indiegogo project, you have 30 days and that’s plenty of time to leverage successes into stories.  I am extremely grateful to the writers and editors that generously shared the Silicon Heroes story. The direct data does not quite do them justice – only 7 total purchases came directly from links in their stories. However, these 3 stories generated over 3,000 shares on social media. That’s pretty incredible, and leads me to my next lesson.

Lesson #3: Getting Likes is Easy. Getting Conversions is hard.

Generating social buzz of a project like Silicon Heroes is pretty easy – it’s a unique project and it’s for a great cause. Just look at the Entrepreneur article I mentioned earlier – that piece has had over 2,300 social shares by itself. The lesson there is to write content that provides real meaning to your audience (the “give to get” approach). However, as popular as that article was, it only generated 3 direct contributions on Indiegogo. Yikes!

Let’s look at the impact of social shares from the direct Indiegogo funnel. The Indiegogo project has been shared on social 878 times. Those shares have led to 753 visits and 18 contributions (2.4%). This was shocking to me – the campaign was visited less than 1 time per social media post!

The lesson for me here is that in order to hit my goal, I’m going to need a MUCH bigger top of funnel. This is why I’m going to start Facebook ads this week. (That and Facebook has led to more contributions than Twitter).

Lesson #4: People like comic books more than customer service. At least on Product Hunt!

The Product Hunt community is awesome. Hiten Shah agreed to post Silicon Heroes on Product Hunt just after midnight. Right after he posted, Intercom (a company with thousands of raving customers) posted their book on customer service. I was immediately nervous but also competitive. I went to bed around 2AM and we were neck and neck with Intercom. I woke back up at 8AM to start my email marketing and saw that we had fallen behind. I emailed a few friends to see if I could rally some support but I wasn’t going to make it my main focus (since I had so much to do on launch day). I was so humbled that the Product Hunt community got behind the project. I looked at the 125 upvotes and I only know about 20 of the people personally so a lot of the upvoting was organic. It really helped that Product Hunt featured us on the top section of their main page for most of the day and Ryan Hoover even tweeted about us. It was so much fun to watch throughout the day!

The lesson I learned is that staying on top of the Product Hunt list requires strong influencers in Europe (before the US wakes up) and then a few champions in the US. I was lucky that Harry Stebbings championed Silicon Heroes in Europe and then Hiten Shah and Ryan Hoover tweeted about us during US daytime. I think that really did it for us. In the end, Product Hunt led to 10 direct contributions.

Speaking of customer service: I just want to quickly thank Marc Hofstatter at Indiegogo for his amazing support of Silicon Heroes. I’ve had a little technical trouble over the past couple days and Marc has responded quickly and routed me to the right support people who could solve the issues. Thanks Marc!

Lesson #5: Thank goodness for amazing friends, colleagues and the awesome tech community.
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This brings me to my last lesson of the launch. I was overwhelmed by the support of my friends, colleagues and the tech community at large. People I know personally have contributed 80% of the contributions so far (which is par for the course for crowdfunded projects at this stage). The tech community has really helped spread the word and lots of people have sent in supportive emails and offered to help. Thanks to Alexis Cox, Tommy Leep, Kumar Thangudic, Aditya Kashap, Jason Lemkin, Hiten Shah and many others that have spent time with me, advised me and lent a hand.

I’m really excited for this week. I’m going to be launching paid marketing (via Facebook ads) and trying out a few growth hacker techniques on social media. Stay tuned!

I feel like an entire month has gone by since my first post last week. I put in a full week of work at Emergence including flying to Seattle for a diligence trip while continuing to make great progress on Silicon Heroes (T-Minus 10 days to the crowdfunding launch). Of course, I got so little sleep that I came down with a nasty sore throat and fever Sunday. Guess the days of being invincible are behind me.

Last week’s post was inspired by my struggles to execute and the lessons learned from that struggle. This week is more about lessons learned from executing on strengths. So here are the top 5 lessons learned from last week:

Lesson #1: Skip what is easy and focus on what is impactful.

• For the past few weeks, I had been creating a list of to do’s in Trello and then ticking them off. I always seemed to get through the majority of the items but a couple of really tough ones would always be there at the end and get punted to the next week. I would always talk myself out of doing the hardest tasks – I would tell myself, “oh that’ll be easier when X is done”. Well, when I really looked at the tasks I wasn’t finishing, they were definitely the hardest tasks but also the ones that had the most leverage for impact.
• Most of these difficult tasks required reaching out to someone important – an influencer, a journalist or someone that could potentially help. In all of these cases, I didn’t know the person so that is what made the task hard. That and the very real personal rejection I would feel when they ignored my emails.
• So last week I just decided to start leveraging my relationships to reach the people that can really move the needle for Silicon Heroes. Yes, it was a lot of work and most of those emails, calls and meetings did not amount to anything. But, the few success cases (thank goodness I had a couple!) will move the needle much more than taking the easy actions of pushing things out into social media or trying to figure out other hacks for marketing.

Lesson #2: Don’t rely on email, get out and talk to people.

• Inside sales teams fall into this trap too. Email is easy. Picking up the phone or meeting face to face is hard. But you know what? When I explain Silicon Heroes to someone in person, they almost always express an interest to help. I think it comes down to two reasons. One, the story becomes interactive and I can focus the conversation on what matters to the other person. Email is one-way communication and the message might be great but not relevant for the receiver. Two, people are busy and emails are easy to delete. It’s hard to ignore a person in a conversation.
• The corollary here is that you have to balance time and impact. 

Lesson #3: Emotional decisions suck. Make them, move on and don’t look back.

• I really struggled with the Kickstarter vs. Indiegogo decision. It sucked a lot of mental cycles and really bogged me down for a couple of days. I have a CEO in my portfolio who has been struggling with a really tough strategic decision for his business and I saw the toll that decision was taking on him. He ultimately made his decision this week and I could see the weight lift right off his shoulders. His courage to make a decision where there is no clear right answer and move forward with conviction helped me in my own much smaller dilemma. These types of emotional decisions can lead to a lot of second guessing and flip flopping. But you just have to make them and move on.

Lesson #4: Time pressure will eventually force you to narrow your focus so stop expanding the scope of possibilities.

• I’m a dreamer. I’m at my best when I get carried away with the possibilities of what could be. I think that’s why I like being a VC. However, that character trait is not great when it comes down to crunch time execution. For the past month, I felt like my to do list was growing faster with new ideas than I was able to knock tasks out. A few days ago I just said no more. I triaged my Trello board and discarded everything but the essentials. It felt great and now I know I’m working on what is necessary.

Lesson #5: Be willing to change your plan on a daily basis.

• Every day I get some new piece of information that causes me to change course. Maybe it is a person I just met who can help in a way I had not planned. Maybe it is an external vendor that isn’t cooperating. Or maybe it is a marketing strategy that is not performing. You just have to have the mental agility to process new information and tack quickly. I used to be bothered by the sunk costs – hey, I put a lot of energy into X. And now I’m just going to abandon it for Y. Actually, yes, when new information comes up, burn the boats and start moving in the new direction. Of course, it’s easy for me to do this because it’s just me most of the time.

So there you have it folks. Hope you all enjoyed another week of a VC trying to moonlight as an entrepreneur. Launch day is 10 days away so this next week is going to be a flurry of activity. Thank goodness for cold meds.

I’m a venture capital investor attempting to moonlight on nights and weekends as an entrepreneur. It has been a challenging, humbling, rollercoaster experience and I wanted to share the experience with others. If for no other reason then so all of the entrepreneurs I work with can have a good laugh at my expense. You’re welcome.

So here it goes: Five painful learning experiences of this past week.

Lesson #1: You cannot predict how website visitors will navigate your website.

• I designed and built my website thinking it would be really simple. People would land on the front page, read the blurb about what I was doing and then click on the big call to action button. After a couple days, I looked at the analytics and found that people did just about everything else other than click on the call to action button. They went to the gallery to look at pictures, they went to the about page to read about the project, they clicked to the social media accounts but mostly they bounced. I was completely mystified because I was emailing my close friends and sending them to the website with the specific goal of clicking through on a specific call to action. I then watched a few people go through the website flow on their phones and I was amazed that they couldn’t figure out what I was asking them to do. Turns out there were a lot of things obfuscating the call to action (it was below the fold, the button blended in with the background, etc.). So I completely overhauled the website and eliminated every single link on the front page except the call to action (which I made appear in 4 different places). Conversion rate increased significantly (it’s amazing that people will click different links to take the same action) and bounce rate declined. I revised the site again to include some of the other information, but kept the front page very focused on one call to action. If you feel like helping me with constructive comments, the website is www.siliconheroes.com).

Lesson #2: Social marketing is unnecessarily hard. I now have a lot more respect for social media marketers after this past week.

• My project involves crowdfunding a graphic novel. As a result, I’ve got a lot of awesome images that I can share on social media to hopefully increase awareness of the project. Great, I should just be able to select images and then send them out via Buffer, right? Wrong. Every social media platform requires a different size image for EVERYTHING – profile pictures, headers and posts. Why hasn’t someone solved this?
• Instagram doesn’t allow posting via API…so you have to post from your mobile phone (instead of Buffer or Hootsuite). I suppose this makes the Instagram user experience better, but marketers must hate this…
• Driving true engagement via social is seemingly impossible if you aren’t a good looking person taking selfies or have puppies/kittens/food in your picture. Sure, people will like your posts, but they won’t take the action you want them to take (clicking links, sharing or following). My initial Facebook post announcing my project received over 120 likes in the first 12 hours but only one person actually completed the call to action (thanks Jung!). If anyone has advice on how to use social media to drive a crowdfunding project, I’d love to chat.

Lesson #3: PR is even harder.

• This was probably the most humbling. I assumed (incorrectly) that a graphic novel that positions entrepreneurs as role models for kids and promotes diversity in tech would definitely attract attention from bloggers and journalists. I just needed to find the right ones, introduce my project and their coverage would launch my crowdfunding project to success. So, I did exactly what a few PR experts told me to do – I used Google image search to find out which journalists and bloggers had written about successful crowdfunding projects. I then reached out to them with a short, personalized email that introduced my project and asked if they would cover the launch. Twenty emails and one week later and I’m still waiting for the first reply.
• I sat down with a friend of mine that owns a big web publication. He actually pulled out his phone and showed me the “tips@” email inbox for his website. It was full of Kickstarter projects and requests for PR coverage. I realized at that moment that there is no way I can rely on any press coverage. Now I’m staring at a pretty daunting marketing challenge.

Lesson #4: Don’t rely on a single platform.

• I give entrepreneurs this advice all the time. Don’t rely on a single platform because then you are beholden to them. So why did I not see this coming? My crowdfunding project has a charity angle – I plan on crowdfunding my graphic novel and then donating all of the profits (beyond the costs of producing the book) to Girls Who Code and Code.org. Imagine my shock and dismay when I tried to submit the project to Kickstarter and found out that Kickstarter does not accept projects where any of the funds are donated to charity. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. I had already shot my video (where I mention the words Kickstarter). All of my creative assets say Kickstarter. My silly ThunderClap says Kickstarter (and I had over 100 people already signed up to Tweet out a message that says Kickstarter). I had already told all of my friends and supporters that I was doing a Kickstarter…and just like that…I wasn’t. Of course, none of this is Kickstarter’s fault. They are pretty clear on their website, I just made incorrect assumptions that my project was going to be okay (though seriously, if you are delivering a great product to the community, why should Kickstarter care what you do with the profits?). As a result of my reliance on a single platform, I spent most of Sunday changing my website, marketing materials and video to now show an Indiegogo campaign. Huge waste of time, lots of lessons learned.

Lesson #5: Every setback is an opportunity.

• All of the above 4 lessons learned involve setbacks. Each setback comes with an accompanying emotional hit. The emotional hits are probably worse than the actual setbacks. The big lesson I tried to take away from this past week (and the Kickstarter fail in particular) is that every setback is an opportunity. Struggling with the website forced me to get much smarter about analytics and link tracking. That is going to prove very useful with marketing. Struggling with social media marketing forced me to spend a lot of time sending emails. My response rate with emails has been fantastic – 80%+ on personalized emails and 30%+ on generic emails. I think the response has been so strong because most of my friends are entrepreneurs or techies and they know how hard it is to launch something. Lastly, struggling with PR is forcing me to think about ways to get dirty with some growth marketing strategies.

​So there you have it folks. Hope you all enjoyed the struggles of a VC trying to moonlight as an entrepreneur. Trust me, I’m better at my day job. The Indiegogo launch date for Silicon Heroes is 16 days away so I’m sure this week is going to have even more setbacks, struggles and challenges. Thank goodness I have a supportive wife and really good friends.