The think (here) Blog

NOTE: This is Part 2 of a 3 part post.  It is strongly recommended that you start at 'Part 1' by clicking here.

3, 2, 1, LAUNCH

The stage was set, the community was pumped, we were ready.  It all boiled down to customizing and re-launching the ad campaign that was so successful for the "Designer" portion of the community over to the "Client" side. 

In all the meetings, discussions, and hypothesizing that lead up to launch day, this seemed like a no brainer.  The clients could use every feature of our site for free.  We assumed we would not have a difficult time getting "Clients" to use the site for free.

Ka-Ching

In our most aggressive Ad Campaign we increased our ad budget nearly ten fold, scrapped our ads catering to "Designers", and put all our resources towards ads to bring in clients.  We decided to go with a big punch up front, and pair it with a low cost, long term follow up.  As the results began pouring in, one thing was certain.  The increase in traffic was nowhere close to the increase in spending.  Even worse, our conversion rate was mind numbingly low.

10 Short days after the ad campaign started we decided to kill it.  Funding running out is a huge problem, especially when it can be directly correlated to 91% of all web traffic.  With funding too low to attempt another sizable campaign we scrambled to come up with a plan to drive clients to the site, but with no "Plan B", relations between partners straining, and a waning community of designers looking for work it was obvious there was no quick fix on the immediate horizon.

The white flag went up, advertising was turned off, our web traffic sputtered to a crawl, and it was back to the drawing board in a big way.  This is the way the world a website ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

In case you did not catch them all, here are the top reasons we failed (including some more that were not mentioned):

We made assumptions about things we had the ability (and time) to test quickly and cheaply.

We did not fully research our competition until 6-9 months into the project.

We targeted a niche market without testing they even existed (more assumptions!)

We built a product before building a community.

We relied on one major traffic source as opposed to a diversified set.

But Wait! This story might have a happy ending after all. Tomorrow's Post: 'Failing Forward' will showcase where we have come since the site fizzled out, and where we are going.