Please Vote For Us In The Lean Challenge:

We officially launched BEG FOR.iT Tuesday, March 08, 2011 at 4:30pm PST right before flying off to SXSW in Austin TX. I've always believed in never being married to an idea or the concept of thinking you know best and that what you put out is exactly perfect and will be a success. When I got to Austion I started going over the panel schedule and noticed the title "The Lean Startup: 10 Reasons Most Startups FAIL". I obviously went and ended up staying for the whole day. Everything that was being said by the presenters clicked.

Interestingly enough we had already built in the ability to turn things on and off from within our site to test and measure. I was already measuring how people were using the site and tracking all the data so that I could make the necessary changes to the site. I was also getting live feeback from those sitting next to me in the conference center. It was an exciting day to be around people dealing with similar challanges with their startups and how things can come together if you pay attention to the data.

Problem:

BEG FOR.iT is a new concept in social giving and taking. There is no other site that we've found that's even close to what we're doing. This in turn is a little confusing to people that come to the site for the first time. I found out that the sign up process had two hurdles that people really weren't willing to go through at this early stage. We had a captcha form in the sign up form that slowed the process down and was hard to read and solve. We also go through an email verification process so it was just doubling the efforts of the user to gain access. We had created to many barriers to entry.

Solution:

With this feedback in hand we removed the captcha form and created a simple graphic showing the process to participate as seen below. It took a lot of the confusion out of the process immediately and the new signups increased by 25% over the next two days.

Shameless Promotion:

That night after the panels were completed I ate dinner at the Kababalicious food trailer. Which by the way is delicious. While I ate I decided I needed to get more word out on the street in Austin about my startup. Fishined dinner and went straight to Kinkos. Created a bunch of stickers with the QR Code that I already had on my backpack that lead directly to the BEG FOR.iT site. I spent the rest of the night posting them up all over downtown Austin. The QR Code I had on my backpack that I carried everywhere actually started a few conversations too. Interestingly enough at the Pepsi Max Lot people would approach and ask if they could shoot the code. One guy was so excited when he found out what BEG FOR.iT was all about that he gave me a bro hug.

It all started with a simple idea. You can preorder the book here at lean.st.