Even kids who go to law school don't learn how to practice until they arrive at a firm, so this is not an obviously inferior method of training.
If you aspire to BigLaw this will never get you there, but if you want to be a consumer-facing plaintiffs' lawyer (where the reality is that well-executed advertising probably beats a stellar education anyway) this might be a wise move.
We laugh at people "on the lower half of the bell curve" who use the "length equals strength" heuristic to evaluate long-form letters, but the same thing happens in these comments all the time.
The challenge with this model is that extracting money from users requires repeated action on their part. That subscription money is so much easier. With an average account life of six months, match.com gets about $180 per paid user.
If you went with a Groupon-like model for a site that revolved around sending people on dates, and assuming you could make about $10 on $20ish dates, each user would have to get out there 18 times in order for you to beat the subscription model.
I still think there could be a big opportunity in a site like this, but it's not hard to see why the incumbents hang onto their subscription models for dear life.
Sure, I was just curious if paid traffic could have been profitable for you. With $8 in profit per shirt and a conversion rate of 0.5%, it looks like anything over $0.04 per click would have resulted in a loss.
Your site was gorgeous, and the idea was strong. Amazing how hard it is to push people to action.
I seem to remember you saying you had a new visitor every 4.5 seconds for 48 hours (can't find it again though). That works out to about 38,000 visitors.
So the conversion rate was 200/38000 = 0.5%? Or am I missing something?
Thanks for being open. I think the most interesting part will be about how many hits you got and what kind of conversion rate you were seeing.
Some of my personal curiosities: How many people abandoned the purchase when confronted with the PayPal form? Do you think you could have been profitable with paid customer acquisition methods (like geo-targeted display ads), or would that have eaten into your profit too much?
Groupon's real "dirty secret" is that they've brilliantly navigated the seedy world of affiliate marketing. As far as I know, Groupon uses the same affiliate networks as Acai scam artists (as opposed to say, building their own a la Amazon) and is (was?) willing to pay several dollars for a single email address.
How they managed that is the real secret and I would be extremely interested in that story.
Maybe not, but those things may still wield pretty heavy influence. Advertising is a strange world of subconscious desires and difficult-to-rationalize preferences (colors and shapes of buttons, for example).
My unused CA S-Corp has been the bane of my existence lately. From the $800 fee to the documentation required to stay in good standing (small, but easy to forget when the company does nothing), it's more pain than it's worth.
If you're someone with lots of ideas and lots of peaks of excitement, it actually might better to postpone incorporation until you can't responsibly continue without some sort of limited liability.
One curse of gifted children is that their work life is significantly more "regular" than their academic achievements. Even if they become doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. there will be plenty of people with the exact same title - many of whom were not similarly gifted.
I imagine there's quite a bit of worry that they should be doing something greater.
If you aspire to BigLaw this will never get you there, but if you want to be a consumer-facing plaintiffs' lawyer (where the reality is that well-executed advertising probably beats a stellar education anyway) this might be a wise move.