Patio11 launches his lifecycle emails course

https://training.kalzumeus.com/lifecycle-emails

by _pius • 14 years ago

193 128 14 years ago

training.kalzumeus.com

tocomment• 14 years ago

That sounds really cool. How does one learn to write a sales letter like that? I found it really compelling.

patio1114• 14 years ago

Read a lot of them, learn what works, implement them for clients, test, learn what works, take off anything you'd be embarrassed to put your own name on, try writing one for yourself.

There's also a lot of books and products available on copywriting. The only one I've ever liked is, well, everything CopyHackers has ever done.

thenomad• 14 years ago

Thank you. Copywriting resources are always valuable, and I'd not heard of Copyhackers. Subscribed.

underdown3• 14 years ago

I heartily recommend Joanne Weibe's ebook here:

http://copyhackers.com/product/handbook-how-to-write-a-long-...

$48 is a little hefty but its also frequently on sale on some of the appsumo/mightydeals type sites.

smoyer3• 14 years ago

I originally became fascinated with long-form sales letters by reading "Mail-Order Success Secrets" by Tyler G. Hicks who made his fortune with those long classified ads you could find in any newspaper and with long-form snail-mail. You can find his works here: http://www.iwsmoney.com/mailorder.htm

ryanio• 14 years ago

This guy needs a few lessons on effective public speaking and presentation, this introduction video of him makes me cringe.. I couldn't watch more than just a few minutes of it. Oh, and a web designer couldn't hurt either, who's going to read those walls of text?

patio1114• 14 years ago

who's going to read those walls of text?

The buyers, mostly.

If you don't run marketing at a B2B SaaS company it is a wall of text. If that's you, I'll save you time: don't read it or, if you do read it, read it only for academic interest on doing copywriting.

If, on the other hand, one is in charge of increasing the sales of a B2B SaaS company, this page is basically designed to be total brain crack.

It presents an idea which is either new or which one is vaguely aware of, presents concrete suggestions for implementation, has a case study which the target customer will find incredibly compelling, teaches one thing they can literally execute on by the end of today, and then drumroll says that if you found the page to be valuable then there are five hours of very dense, action-packed video and guides where that came from, for a very reasonable price by the standards of B2B SaaS companies.

jpadvo• 14 years ago

I can attest to the brain-crackness. We're a bootstrapped startup that is starting to have a compelling product, and starting to think more about how to market it. We're definitely aware of the idea of lifecycle marketing and have been thinking about implementing it.

If purchasing this course lets us get a lifecycle marketing system going that is 10% more effective two weeks earlier than if we had to learn the lessons ourselves, it would pay for itself. Of course, if we had to smash our brains against it and try to pick out a cohesive strategy from across the internet it's very likely to take us a long time - months or years - to learn all the things in the course.

If you're in the target market for this product, and you know patio11 enough to trust him, the sales pitch boils down to "You give me several hundred dollars, and I'll give you thousands of dollars."

Haha, but even with that rational analysis done, the idea of spending that much on something pains my bootstrapping mind tremendously.

underdown3• 14 years ago

Long form sales copy is all about bullet points, headings, subheadings - essentially presenting a ton of copy in an easily digestible format - specifically avoiding looking like a wall of text!

mjfisher• 14 years ago

I am most definitely not your target customer for this (not yet, anyway - one day, maybe, who knows?)

Still, it's quite clear how well you demonstrate value - that last paragraph is exactly one sentence long and yet has five concise, concrete pointers on what exactly makes long copy good. As such, I suspect buyers will be extremely happy with the content of the actual course :)

For now I'll continue to enjoy the rest of your excellent free content. Thanks and good luck!

whatusername• 14 years ago

Does the long sales copy letter (on the web) have a place when you're selling a SASS app? Say an appointment reminder system? I've been convinced it works for info products -- but haven't seen good examples for applications.

(or is the long for content done only in emails and not on the site itself)

w1ntermute3• 14 years ago

> this introduction video of him makes me cringe

This is true. The video is poor quality - washed out. And despite wearing a bulky headset with an enormous microphone, there are weird feedback(?) "booms" every few seconds.

I personally couldn't get past the gimmick with the $100 bill. It was really tacky and is such a cliched TV informercial ploy for attention.

The red tracksuit doesn't help convey a sense of authority either. He didn't properly comb his hair (though this is an understandable issue for many people, get some hair gel). And there are distracting reflections on his glasses - an easy solution for this is contacts. The background of the room, all Japanese-y, is distracting as well.

Summary: if you're going to be a salesman on video, you need to look the part. Patrick most definitely does not look the part.

BryanB552• 14 years ago

I agree. I know Patrick is known around HN for giving out good info but watching some of his videos was oddly distracting to me because something in the back of my mind reminds how awkward they are. Even just start by losing the nerdy headset I think it will help viewers focus more on the content rather than the awkwardness in the video.

jwwest• 14 years ago

>The background of the room, all Japanese-y, is distracting as well.

Well, he does live in Japan...

beambot• 14 years ago

At first I thought you were being sarcastic... Patrick delivered one of the most amazing talks of all time at Business of Software (ie. the "Old Spice" presentation):

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/26/software-for-underserved...

You might not like this video, but I wouldn't generalize so prematurely.

smoyer3• 14 years ago

I didn't think it was as bad as you're describing ... and it's very hard to perform on video presentations that don't include an audience (you feed off an audience's energy and get immediate feedback ... and in my case I get a real shot of adrenaline too).

patio1114• 14 years ago

I'm happy to answer questions, as always, but would prefer talking about the business of doing this rather than about the product. (I'm not comfortable selling on HN.) I'll probably blog about it in more detail later, too.

dave16193• 14 years ago

I've been following your blog, podcasts, comments here, etc and learn a lot from you. I've gotta say you hit a big need with the email course, and though I wish the price was $99 I know you're delivering based on value and the course is probably worth more than the $300 price to me. So, I'll probably get it. I think a sample video from the course (ie., 5 minutes would help a lot) to help people take the leap. Or a 2 minute intro video to the course. There's something about video (especially when the author's face comes and he starts talking) that adds more legitimacy and seriousness to the offer.

patio1114• 14 years ago

That's the opposite of what I expect but, since it is entirely possible that video + text does outperform text, there's A/B tests running to that effect.

BryanB552• 14 years ago

Any reason you decided to launch this on a Friday? Or just random? I'm wondering what kind of data people have seen for the best day of the week to attract attention to a launch.

patio1114• 14 years ago

It was supposed to be launched weeks ago, and I was hoping for a Tuesday, but a) waterfall development sucks even more for videos than for software, b) we totally blew the ship date about four times as a consequence, and c) I step on a plane to America in ~12 hours so I wanted to get it launched prior to the next several weeks of conferences & etc.

tedunangst• 14 years ago

I clicked the link a few hours ago, got an error, figured you'd fix it, waited, but still get it now. There's a little box that says "We're sorry, but something went wrong. We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly." Apparently I'm the only one, but I can't get to the site.

patio1114• 14 years ago

It should be up now. Long story short: had a SPoF, it held up to the HNing pretty admirably but enough people actually started downloading enough movies at once to kill the SPoF and that caused sporadic degradation of the site.

I'll write up the story and the mitigation later.

philk4• 14 years ago

That is a really nice sales letter and I've bookmarked it to read through repeatedly when I need to write one. It nails the long form sales format and manages to do so without sounding sleazy[1].

I particularly like the Do not buy this course section which qualifies potential customers.

[1] To be fair depending upon the target demographic the sleaziness can be increased without causing problems. If you were building a product for hard core sales guys Your Customers Can Still Afford Branded Groceries: Learn How To Capture This Wasted Revenue Today! might do brilliantly.

atldev• 14 years ago

Patrick has earned trust in the community by giving away so much valuable information. My first thought was that it's about time you sold some of this info. The reason is great: "I got tired of saying no." Good stuff, and thanks for all the free advice along the way.

r00k• 14 years ago

Hi Patrick,

I'd like to preface this comment by saying that I'm a huge fan of your work. You've personally helped me a ton.

That said, I must ask what made you choose video as the medium for this content. Frankly, you're a much stronger writer than on-camera personality.

Even beyond congeniality, why is five hours of video at 150wpm superior to a medium-length ebook I can read at 800wpm?

Thanks!

philk4• 14 years ago

I prefer reading too but most people will pay more for a video than they will for an ebook regardless of the value contained within because they've been trained repeatedly that books are cheap.

mechanical_fish• 14 years ago

Patrick and Ramit Sethi discuss this very thing in the last Kalzumeus podcast.

Book pricing isn't as hopelessly broken as music pricing, but that is faint praise indeed. It's sad. Writing a good book is a great deal of work, reading a good book provides a great deal of value, but the psychology of the book market recognizes neither of these facts. People vaguely imagine that producing books costs approximately the time required to type them, and expect to buy books for the cost of buying, inking, and shipping the paper - if the paper is absent they expect the price to be negligable.

Whereas the one good thing to be said about modern college tuitions is that they provide a nice big anchor for the cost of a "course". Practically anything looks like a bargain next to the list price of an hour of TA instruction at Harvard. [1]

[1] That's a fun math problem: Assuming five courses at Harvard, five hours per week of lecture and recitation per course, a fourteen-week semester and $38k tuition and fees, I come up with about $55 per hour per student. Of course, Harvard does not bill by the hour, but that's a whole 'nother essay.

unreal372• 14 years ago

re: "you're a much stronger writer than on-camera personality" LOL, that's a back-handed compliment there.

I think he's aiming to get better at his video production and presentation skills, and believes video delivers more perceived value than just text. Text is not a course, it's an ebook. Courses are worth more than ebooks every day of the week. Perceived value > actual value when it comes to sales... Who's going to pay $2,000 (site license) for an ebook?

BTW, I love video and audio players that allow you to speed up play - 1.5x, 1.75x or 2.0x . Coursera has that, love it.

davewasthere• 14 years ago

I'm a self-proclaimed patio11 fanboi, and rave about him to anyone who'll listen. But admittedly, his writing is what I rave about. I'm ambivalent about his videos.

The ideas are still there, but I admit, it needs to be at my reading speed to be interesting.

peterjancelis2• 14 years ago

Patrick, I'd be interested in how you decided on your pricing. With all the pre-selling and your friendship with Amy Hoy I was honestly expecting prices to be about 10-12 times as high, or 5-6 times based on the full price starting next week. What makes you think you will sell 10 times as much at $249 than at $2490?

patio1114• 14 years ago

It actually might be underpriced, to be totally honest, but not that underpriced I don't think.

To justify prices in the > $2k region I think I would need to add some sort of interactive component (webinar or what have you), and I have no time on the schedule for that in the next couple of months, so I went with something which was totally self-guided for my first try. I might revisit that eventually, if there's lots of demand for it and if it makes sense for the business.

graeme8• 14 years ago

I agree. I wasn't expecting it to be within my price range (though I'm glad that it is).

Buying is a trivial decision at $300. We sell a $350 product, with high margins. A single sale and this course pays for itself. (2-3, if you include my time spent watching and implementing it)

edit: turns out I didn't even notice the price. It's actually $250. I was prepared to pay anything up to $400 without thinking about it or discussing reimbursement with my company.

loumf4• 14 years ago

You are right -- typically courses in the $X k range need some interactive component -- but it needn't be a webinar.

You want 2k+? -- offer to edit 3 emails -- you probably wouldn't get enough takers to take too much time. Also, it price anchors the $249 and you can do it like Kickstarter and limit the # of sales of bonuses like this.

For $10k or more, write a first draft of emails and look over the final draft after they edit.

trhtrsh3• 14 years ago

What, feature-based pricing instead of value-based pricing?

citizens2• 14 years ago

Amy Hoy's Freckle [app] starts at $12/mo.

peterjancelis2• 14 years ago

I was referencing her educational course called 3x500.

dchuk• 14 years ago

Looks like your site is throwing an error right now Patrick: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/546067/Screenshots/cpc58_yeew2b.png (I realize that message shows nothing but it's all I could come up with to help out right now)

tisme3• 14 years ago

Selling shovels during a goldrush is a great way to make money! Patrick is sure to rake it in with this one, and with the 'money back guarantee' you really can't go wrong. HN is the perfect target demographic for this product.

patio1114• 14 years ago

I think there's a nuance to "selling shovels during a goldrush" suggesting that shovel-sellers exploit the naive 49ers, the majority of whom will end up with no gold. That really isn't the point of the exercise.

Most of my consulting clients, and the people I build this for, are not in a gold-rush. They run profitable businesses selling software to other businesses. This is a business input for them which they have a clear path to profiting from. It is about as speculative an investment as a pizzeria buying basket of tomatoes.

If there is anyone hypothetically thinking of buying this basket of tomatoes because they want to aspirationally run a pizzeria one day, please don't. I don't want your money. Go read my blog. Found a pizzeria. Find customers for it. When you need this you'll know, and it will be a screamingly obvious mutual win.

tisme3• 14 years ago

For someone who isn't comfortable selling on HN you're doing a stellar job of it! Telling people that you don't want their money is a great strategy.

MikeKusold• 14 years ago

Was this inspired through talks with Ramit? I am seeing a similar model appear. He uses free emails to sell courses, and you use free blog posts to sell emails.

bmccormack• 14 years ago

"Switching customers to annual billing radically decreases churn, one of the key risks to SaaS businesses long-term."

Where I can I read more about annual billing decreasing churn? I've read your blog post (or email?) about switching to annual billing to free up revenue to acquire new customers, but I don't remember reading about how it decreases churn as well.

patio1114• 14 years ago

Dharmesh Shah has talked about it extensively -- basically, of people on monthly billing, at any given time approximately 100% are at risk of churn. Of people on annual billing, < 10% are at risk of churn at any given time. They also have less opportunities to hit involuntary churn like, e.g., getting a CC declined or expired.

dshah• 14 years ago

Indeed, that's true.

One additional point: Customers that commit to annual billing generally tend to churn less often overall -- because they've made a more "considered" purchase and committed more time to the purchasing decision.

loumf4• 14 years ago

Raise prices (well, wait 2 days, so I can get my purchase through) -- I just sent a note to my boss that this is a no-brainer for the $999. And, we already do email campaigns like this, and probably do 80% of what you are going to suggest (at least), and we only have 3 people that would directly benefit from knowing this -- but, we think it would be a nice perk to employees to see the course.

Quote from co-worker: "It would be worth it even if we learn one new, non-generic thing to try" Of course, we sell software that goes for $x0,000+, so anything that moves the needle with leads ROFLstomps $999.

(I have been waiting to write a response to patio11 like this for a while)

w1ntermute3• 14 years ago

> I have been waiting to write a response to patio11 like this for a while

I believe it's also the first time someone other than patio11 has used the word "ROFLstomp" on HN ;)

Cass• 14 years ago

Yeah, my first response to seeing the price was "WTF? Raise your prices!" as well. I was expecting a number somewhere in the four figures.

I mean, I was only checking on the price out of curiosity because I'm a broke student who doesn't even sell software, but if a broke student's first response to your offering is "Hey, that's actually only a little bit too expensive for hours worth of instructive entertainment!" to the point where I was tempted to buy for like two seconds, you can be sure that you could extract a whole lot more money than that from people who'll get actual business value out of it.

patio1114• 14 years ago

I just want to mention that I really appreciate both this advice and your other comment below, and am starring it for future reference.

Sukotto• 14 years ago

How does one save comments on HN? Do you access via some sort of overlay app with better functionality than the vanilla site or do you just bookmark stuff to your browser (or pinboard or whatever)

harisenbon2• 14 years ago

If you can't believe how cheap it is now, you should have seen the pricing structure that he was proposing until a number of his friends said "Have you been LISTENING to your own advice over the last 5 years?"

reinhardt• 14 years ago

> Of course, we sell software that goes for $x0,000+

Well that makes it a no-brainer. OTOH sending a note to my boss when our SaaS offering is $9/user/month would be a much harder sell.

loumf4• 14 years ago

What's your lifetime value -- 3 years is ~$360 -- so 1 more customer certainly justifies this price.

Also, I guess my suggestion is to have a more expensive option for those that are going to get a lot of value out of it. Even just segmenting 5/10 users vs. Enterprise would probably have us buying the enterprise version (I am part of a giant company)

whileonebegin• 14 years ago

This is a 10 mile long sales page, down to the P.S. at the bottom. The copy itself, sounds genuine. However, the look of the page itself is a turn-off. Why did you decide to use this format as opposed to a simple, cut & dry page with a big "buy now" button?

swombat• 14 years ago

Long form sales letters are proven, statistically, in many contexts, to convert more. It's really that simple. He could do a short and snappy page, but then he'd probably lose thousands of dollars a day. Or he can make people like you feel like it's a bit spammy, and make thousands of extra bucks a day. I know which one I'd choose.

regularfry• 14 years ago

This is patio11. He's almost certainly A/B testing the length of the page to figure out whether a short page or a long one works better.

graeme8• 14 years ago

How do you do credit card processing without asking for a billing address? Your checkout process was very simple, makes my company's process look cumbersome.

Also, I noticed you don't use paypal. Could you elaborate on that choice? My guess is that you know your demographic is used to using credit cards, and it eliminates a step, but I'd like to confirm

patio1114• 14 years ago

How do you do credit card processing without asking for a billing address?

Stripe.

Could you elaborate on that choice?

Stripe! (No, seriously: I have the capability of running things through Paypal but a) that code is from BCC and written when I was young and stupid, and I was afraid of breaking something if I just copy/paste ported it over, b) this keeps my accountant happy, and c) there was a non-zero "risk" of this selling five figures in a day with $1,000 charges in the mix, which would mean Paypal and I would have to have a chat, and that was a complication I just didn't need right now.)

kareemm• 14 years ago

@patio11 - Typo: "The course is on sale for until October 5th"

smoyer3• 14 years ago

Wow ... now here's a testimonial!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4587080

EDIT - Linked to the other HN topic. Just click through for the story

spitfire2• 14 years ago

I seem to be A/B tested out of the sample video. Anyone have a link?

patio1114• 14 years ago

Append ?video=yes to the URL. It will shortcircuit A/Bingo. (n.b. This behavior ships off by default in A/Bingo for a variety of reasons -- think very hard before enabling it.)

amix2• 14 years ago

Sorry for not being an ass kisser, but I think this is way too overpriced and I would not like to see HN turn into a marketplace. Imagine if every HN contributor started selling their knowledge this way - - it would be a bad community where everything was behind paid walls. And yes, I do know that Patrick has contributed a lot to HN, but so has thousands of others, and I am sure he has learnt a ton here as well. There's no need to monetize this or to encourage monetization of this kind of knowledge.

aaronblohowiak• 14 years ago

I am glad that Redhat and Canonical exist; there certainly is a place for value-added "deep dives". I am glad that this is available for purchase instead of being locked away in his head.

HyprMusic• 14 years ago

Look at his comment: "but would prefer talking about the business of doing this rather than about the product. (I'm not comfortable selling on HN.)".

The site also goes in to a lot of detail about the method used on WPEngine, unlike most of these product sites which only drip feed you enough information to convince you to buy their product. He even commended an article[1] which attempts to de-construct his method and share it. I personally believe that he is genuinely offering to share his help (for a fee - which is reasonable), rather than trying to extract money out of HN user's.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4587080

loumf4• 14 years ago

On the HN I read, there is a nearly constant stream of ShowHN posts with paid services and promotions of Y-Combinator startups who stand to gain from the exposure. It has always been part of HN culture to promote our projects -- particularly accepted if you are a major contributor and didn't just register to post.

For someone who stands to make a lot of money from acting on the information here, I am happy to pay for it.

Frankly, if it were free, I probably wouldn't bother to watch it -- I already do a lot of email dripping -- free, to me, would mean that it's basic, and that I wouldn't benefit from it.

brianfryer2• 14 years ago

> Frankly, if it were free, I probably wouldn't bother to watch it

Excellent point! I feel the same way about most free Internet-busines videos. Plus, I'm much more inclined to listen to, and take action on, advice from trustworthy sources. By contributing so much to HN, Patrick has built up a tremendous amount of trust.

sudonim• 14 years ago

> There's no need to monetize this or to encourage monetization of this kind of knowledge.

Respectfully disagree. If Patrick didn't have the incentive of making money on the course, he wouldn't have invested the time, effort and money to make it. I believe he hired another person to help with video editing too. Who pays for that?

Nothing creates a healthy ecosystem of knowledge exchange more than people being fairly compensated for their knowledge and hard work.

davidw• 14 years ago

I hope you do not get downvoted, for providing a different point of view. However, I think the important thing to look at is the ratio of useful input on this site to "selling stuff". With patio11, it's very high: he provides tons of useful advice and information, and rarely out and out just "sells stuff". So when he does... well, great, good for him, let's hope it works out!

If on the other hand, someone only comments to promote their own products, I'd look a bit more askance at that.

bdunn• 14 years ago

Based on the fact that your "premium" product offering comes out to about $2/month I can see why you think this is overpriced. For those of us charging real amounts of dollars for our products, spending $250 to get on the fast track to improving paid conversion rates is more than worth it.

amix2• 14 years ago

This has nothing to do if I can afford this or not. Imagine if you had to pay $250 every time somebody had some knowledge to tell you, would this be a great community that encouraged learning to build the best stuff we can build? Probably not.

I am sure that many of us has shared a ton of knowledge/code/whatever that has been far more worth than $250 (I know I have), but there is no need to sell this and monetize this, especially not here on HN.

latortuga• 14 years ago

You've got to be kidding me, way too overpriced? $250? He's selling it to B2B SaaS businesses for whom that's most likely around the cost of a single sale. I can't fathom any situation where a B2B business would classify $250 as "way too overpriced" for almost anything, let alone a product that could give them a double-digit multiplier increase on conversions.

nfm• 14 years ago

I can't wait to be able to compensate patio11 financially for all the actionable, money making help he's given me for free. Sign me up.

ZoFreX• 14 years ago

The price is negligible, first off (in the context of a business training course, even an online self-directed one). It's priced so low that I would consider buying it myself, personally, if I thought it would make me better at my job but my employer wouldn't fork out for it. That's an aggressive price point.

Secondly, there's nothing wrong with getting paid for your hard work. If people don't want to pay, and other people want to give advice for free, that can and will still happen - the two models can coexist, they aren't mutually exclusive. I think some geeks are a little wary of paid products and would do well to try selling something they make that has value for users.

follower2• 14 years ago

Keep in mind that patio11 didn't submit this, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=_pius did.

richardw• 14 years ago

He's been helping startups since long before he joined HN. He's built up a following of his own. He's been telling us all for a while that we can monetise a mailing list, so when he builds one and starts selling a how-to-sell-via-mail on it, we shouldn't be terribly surprised. And he didn't submit it to HN, someone else did.

Here are some of the responses:

1) It must be free.

Well, he's always telling us how to compete with free. Nothing stops us from reading the huge set of equivalent material online, but it'll cost more for anyone who values their time.

2) This is too expensive.

He's repeatedly told us that people who say this shouldn't be the focus of our marketing. Focus on the ones who have the means and ability to recognise value. Capture the consumer surplus where possible.

3) It's too cheap.

Don't worry, he'll find a way to extract the consumer surplus at some point. This is a great lead-in to consulting.

And you know what? Great. Make the money, Pat. Tell us how to do these things, and then show us in a very tangible way how it works, by convincing us to buy something. If that doesn't teach the principles, not much else will.

alphazulu• 14 years ago

Patrick built up good karma and now he's CASHING OUT.

His advice wasn't free. Oh no. The invoice is in now. Ka Ching!

I actually like Patrick, but come on people.

enraged_camel• 14 years ago

Knowledge should be free? What kind of world do you live in exactly?

sgdesign• 14 years ago

This is a very hypocritical stance. I don't know what you do for a living, but assuming you're a programmer, aren't you "monetizing knowledge" every day?

And you say there's "no need" to monetize this, but what about the need to put food on your table or pay your bills? Patrick gives away 99% of everything he writes for free, and when he does start charging for that last 1% you still find a way to complain…

swah• 14 years ago

If he priced it too low, he would be going against his own teachings...

larrys2• 14 years ago

patio11 what you have written is great and I have the highest respect for what you do (and things that you have said).

But - separate from any conflict or cynicism that others have raised as far as HN becoming a marketplace, there was to much to read (and in fact I didn't read it, I skimmed it) so I wouldn't feel comfortable paying the amount you are asking which was located at the bottom.

I feel you should have started at the top with:

"If This Doesn't Create Value For Your Business, I Don't Want Your Money"

(pricing options)

Want to know more? Read below.

Just my thoughts. By the way I have no doubt that you have thought long and hard about putting that price at the bottom of the letter and could point to backup for that strategy (perhaps in something you've written before or generally accepted knowledge). But my reaction is my reaction so I just thought I'd throw it out there.

31reasons• 14 years ago

If you guys want to learn direct mail marketing, print and read all these letters from Gary Halbert from the 80s. It still applies now very much so. http://www.trafficplusconversion.com/1345/gary-halbert-lette... There is a limit how much you can learn by reading and watching million dollar videos. Its all about doing and testing for your business.

propercoil• 14 years ago

So basically you linked to your squeeze page at HN.

Here is a lesson in conversion: make your video auto play next time.

Other than that i really hate where HN is going upping this thread

follower2• 14 years ago

> So basically you linked to your squeeze page at HN.

Note that patio11 didn't link to anything--this was submitted by http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=_pius

laurentoget• 14 years ago

When did Hacker News turn into an MLM platform?

This page looks like a late night TV Amway infomercial, complete with third rate camera acting. Or rather looked before their webserver bit the dust.

grey-area• 14 years ago

This line from the article had a particular resonance for me given the slow drip feed of articles from Patio11 on HN gradually establishing credibility ↬

Drip marketing means sending a timed sequence of emails to educate, persuade, and only then sell.

scoot• 14 years ago

So for those curious, but not curious enough to sign up for WPengine's "course", here's the first email:

"I just wanted to say hello and thank you for your interest in WP Engine. I saw that you filled out our speed test form, and wanted to let you know that there is a real person over here, and that I'm interested to hear how you feel about us so far.

Do you have any questions or concerns? Can I help you make a decision either way?

Thanks!

Trafton Esler Lead Developer Champion"

There are so many things wrong with this email I don't know where to start. My only hope is that they inserted this email into the sequence /after/ Patio11's involvement; otherwise it's a warning sign (along with the awful video on the sales page) that his course is not all it's hyped-up up to be.

Good luck anyway, there's a sucker born every minute.

lukevdp• 14 years ago

What's wrong with the email? If you don't know where to start, just pick the thing that's most wrong.

graeme8• 14 years ago

That email got me to reply, and moved our business to WP engine faster. Trafton gave me some info that helped convince our tech guy.

And then I stole that email in our campaign (with some modifications), to great results. I even got lots of "Wow, you guys are real humans and not robots" replies.

I'm interested to hear what you say is wrong with the email, because you haven't yet.

edit: The lead developer champion bit wasn't in the email they sent me.

ericabiz• 14 years ago

Hello! I'm Erica, and I consulted for WP Engine at the same time as Patrick. I worked side by side with Patrick during the week he was at WP Engine--Jason (their CEO) hired me to jump-start their entire marketing department for 3 months, vs. Patrick's specific "email drip feed" task.

I'm intimately familiar with the details of the open rates and conversion rates from WP Engine's email series; in fact, I was the one who helped sequence them and proofread/edit some of them after Patrick left.

I can tell you with 100% authority that you are dead wrong. That email converts extremely well. In fact, it used to go directly to Trafton's inbox and he had fun showing me all the responses people sent to him every day.

If you want the spoiler details, it converts well because people love to know there's a real human behind all this nonsense that we call "the Internet." (And it also converts well because Trafton is a machine who seems to never sleep and responds to everyone's questions quickly...another key ingredient. Everyone was always asking Jason how they could "hire a Trafton.") It speaks well for the people Jason hires, as well as the effectiveness of the email itself. There you have it, from the horse's mouth.

austingunter• 14 years ago

Hey Scoot, sorry the emails didn't grab you. I want to echo Erica's comments below. She and Patrick laid an amazing groundwork for transparent and human communication that Trafton, and when I joined the company during SXSW this year, I was able to build upon and make it easy to communicate with our customers when they have questions or just way to say hey.

It's been working so far :-)

If you have more thoughts about the email, I'd love to read them and learn from your perspective. There may be a perspective here that I am blind to, and you could teach me something.

JesseAldridge• 14 years ago

Didn't like the video. From http://ycombinator.com/video.html:

"Please do not recite a script written beforehand. Just talk spontaneously as you would to a friend. People delivering memorized speeches (or worse still, text read off the screen) usually come off as stupid. Unless you're a good enough actor to fake spontaneity, you lose more in the stilted delivery than you gain from a more polished message."

trhtrsh3• 14 years ago

Um, people who aren't gifted speakers come off as stupid when they talk spontaneously about a topic.

pestaa• 14 years ago

So if one comes off as stupid either way on the video, why not just write it down?

nandemo• 14 years ago

That advice is specifically for people applying to Y Combinator. Not very relevant to marketing videos in general.

noahc• 14 years ago

Patrick,

Congrats! You've shipped something of value to the world.

ky3• 14 years ago

God, I'm so envious reading all these comments -- patio11 struck a gold mine of the golden mean!

You know you've priced okay when (1) people bitch it's too high and (2) people bitch it's too low.

You know you've MVP'ed when (1) people bitch it's too ugly (walls of text!) and (2) people say it's not.

You also know you've MVP'ed when (1) people bitch the video's terrible (WTF? he didn't comb his hair!) and (2) others don't give a flip.

Now back to the price: it's not like big pharma has some kind of insta-power pill that chomps down all that consumer surplus. For a one-man show he did great.

Patio11 launches his lifecycle emails course

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