Sit Rep
08 Jun 2022It’s been a long time since I’ve updated this blog. Four months today to be precise. A lot has been happening. And also not happening (a house full of COVID kids and other assorted excuses). So in the honourable spirit of #buildinpublic here’s a summary of my fevered thinking:
Agency Work / Ugli
This has been the bulk of what’s been going on.
We’ve had ongoing CRO and SEO work for https://shop.imi.com.hk which is going well (they’re in unrecognisably better shape now than in mid-2020 when we were hired).
We launched and are now managing a large suite of complex Drupal sites for English for Asia (such as http://hongkongtesol.com/) of which we’re rather proud.
We also have a couple of other large development projects on the books via Yellow Fish (a creative agency we work with a lot): an e-com site and an events platform.
This has been using a lot of our (my) intellectual bandwidth.
As mentioned previously, the activities associated with “old Ugli” (knocking out large Drupal websites / e-com stores for HK clients) is declining fast, hence my scramble for new areas of work, reasons being:
- HK is under the cosh and few are investing in new businesses
- Site builders, #nocode and DIY platforms are improving all the time
- Personally, and as a team, our skills are stronger in marketing, strategy and development than they are in design
So to this end I’ve decided to de-prioritise https://ugli.hk (UGLI/HK: our main website since inception in 2010) and move portfolio work, client backlinks and non-HK-specific blog content over to https://ugli.site (UGLI/UK a new work-in-progress Webflow site recently created).
The value prop for UGLI/UK will be “Web development & associated services for creative agencies”. This plays to our strengths as a team, not to mention my personal preferences for strategy over design. UGLI/UK will offer agency clients: web and e-com dev (you make it pretty, we make it work), email, SEO, CRO, hosting and maintenance.
After getting the website to a respectable state, my next step here is to learn how cold email works, which is not something I’ve had to do before.
Productised Service / CRO Beast
My attempt to offer my CRO/marketing skills as a subscription service has had a very modest start. Via Twitter I have managed to sign up two ongoing subscription clients for “CRO Beast”, plus via Twitter and some very old friends I’m mid-negotiation for a one-off CRO and copywriting project for https://www.totalticketing.com/ **based in HK.
I have become very aware that it needs new name: “CRO” is a specialist term (and specialists are not my market) and “Beast” is a fun nickname but of no relevance or value.
The “offer” needs work also. I read Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers (good summary here). A good offer needs the following elements:
- Dream outcome (ie convert more of your visitors)
- Perceived high likelihood of achievement
- Perceived short time delay to success
- Perceived low effort & sacrifice
Offers can be enhanced with
- Perceived scarcity
- Perceived urgency
- Including bonuses
- Offering guarantees
- Good naming (ie. of the offer)
My challenge at the moment is finding a way of expressing the outcome in a universally appealing manner. I could say something like
Increase your CVR by x% within 3 months or your money back in full
And I could only take clients where I thought that was doable.
But… Not everyone thinks in terms of conversions / CVR.
I don’t know if this should be an ongoing service, a one-off, a cohort based course, or some mixture of the above.
Plus I’m very aware that the cro-beast.com site is way too jargony, too texty, rather stuffy. It needs to be friendlier, more focused on benefits, and perhaps use video of me explaining the deal (once I know what it is).
This item is frustrating me at the moment. I know I’m good at CRO, I have proof. I just need to know how to wrap it up to sell it. Once I get that part right, this it is going to go off.
SaaS Projects / Swimming App
This hasn’t moved forward since February but is still something I want to pursue. I spoke to Patrick (my partner on this project) today and am now extremely excited (again) to get this to an MVP stage. Next step is wireframes.
More of this coming soon…
So .. that’s where I am! Stay tuned.