First Go Around: CheatDay Adventures

Cheat Day Adventures was the first startup I began working on with Ian Serlin. We both having read Tim Ferris’s book, The Four Hour Body, decided to create a social community to make experiencing ‘cheat days’ more exciting. A cheat day is one day a week during the slow carb diet in which you max out your caloric intake to keep your body from entering ketosis. Therefore, it is essentially a day to pig out to your heart’s content. This activity, of course, is fun in itself, but could become oh so much better if we made it more social and added a competitive aspect because sometimes eating 10,000 calories by yourself just feels sad.

The basic business idea was to have various individuals create either one or multiple meal adventures within their respective neighborhoods for other people to join in on. For a competitive aspect, the leading individuals would have the opportunity to add food/drink challenges to their meals still with the goal of maximizing caloric intake. Along the same line, once we had a large customer base, a business would eventually be able to host an adventure; therefore, create their own branded challenges for the group.

After hashing out the general concept, we began working on branding, logo design, and how to quickly test the idea for a proof of concept. We wanted the brand to communicate that we were a young, exciting, adventurous group of people centered on trying new restaurants throughout a city. The basic sketch of the logo I designed in Illustrator tries to communicate that.

- the compass symbolizes traveling to new areas

- the group of people pointing north shows a

  social aspect

- the fork and knife communicates the food aspect

- the overall colors and cartoony idea show fun

  and relaxed instead of serious and straight-faced

To quickly introduce the service to the public we started a Meetup group, designed a squeeze page through Unbounce, and created flyers to spread around the various establishments that our first planned adventure would take place.

The Meetup group served two purposes. It gave us an avenue to quickly share the idea with multiple people already looking to engage in social activities and gave us a quick proof of product with our MVP (minimum viable product). The Meetup group was called CheatDay Adventures SF, and although it no longer exists, we ended up organizing two events and gaining 100+ members. 

The squeeze page allowed us to collect member information immediately to gauge interest, to funnel people from the Meetup group to our own website when ready, and to test how successful different marketing material was via custom landing pages and custom url tracking on flyers. The bottom line of the squeeze page was to easily gauge the public’s interest in our idea once we convince people to visit the site. To design the squeeze page and its copy I researched what makes a good squeeze page through various blogs and interviews on Mixergy, http://mixergy.com/rick-perreault-unbounce-interview/ .

The flyers I created in Illustrator were designed to communicate the same message as the logo, to provide segue information to our landing page, to A/B test the copy of discounts and taglines, and to simply test the successfulness of flyers. The flyers were placed in the three different establishments our adventure would patron, in coffee shops around the neighborhood, and were passed out in the San Francisco financial district during weekday lunchtime about 2 weeks prior to the adventure. The flyers in each location had a custom url to track which flyers were successful. In the end, even though the majority of all flyers were taken or passed out, most people did not end up visiting our squeeze page and of those that did only 2% converted (signed up with their email and name). From this we determined that flyers weren’t as effective as we had originally thought and/or the business idea and/or copy wasn’t convincing enough. Unfortunately, there was not enough data to determine which copy on the flyers or squeeze pages, through A/B testing, converted more.

The plan was to start an email campaign, after getting enough conversions, to interact with the community while we continued to build and flesh out the system. I set up the email campaign through MailChimp, but no more than 2 emails were sent to the community before we stopped the project. However, to plan out the email campaign I learned a lot about email copy and email campaigns from various e-books and again, Mixergy, http://mixergy.com/cheat-sheet-7-ways-to-promote-your-products-with-great-copywriting/ .

So, we generated a business idea from something we wanted ourselves, did some minor market research, and set up/researched ways to quickly spread and test our idea. For my first attempt at a start up, therefore in my naivety, I thought we were all set and golden. Let the money start pouring in!

Wait. Too bad our idea didn’t have a clear reliable way to make money that we’d tested or researched. There were two possible avenues. One: People that organize and lead adventures have to pay a membership fee (something similar to Meetup). This avenue has one major fault that makes me continually curse at my computer screen when using Meetup though. If the leaders are the ones paying, then I as the business don’t care if they are good leaders or if the groups they create are active or not. In the case of Meetup, I always have to sift through dead groups that still exist because the group creator still has their credit card account hooked up. Two: Have every pay a membership to use the service or have people pay to go on adventures. Technically this is two separate ideas, but at this stage faces the same major problem. Will people pay to join this community and/or go on adventures? We started asking this question to people including people that came to our Meetup events. We also asked if they would be willing or interested in leading their own adventures.

This is when I realized we weren’t so golden. First, hardly anyone at all was willing to even consider designing his or her own adventure. (Ian and I had designed some pretty awesome adventures though, so perhaps we were setting the bar too high. Haha.) Second… there really is no second, because if people weren’t going to create adventures it wouldn’t matter if people would pay to go on them or not. Ian and I weren’t going to create adventures for neighborhoods we didn’t know. And in fact, a high percentage of people asked said they would be willing to pay a monthly fee.

People from the Meetup group were excited about the idea because they felt like they were having planned fun with others without having to think about it. In other words, all they had to do was sit back and gain the benefits of some local’s knowledge of how to have fun. This made sense because the majority of people we attracted were fairly new to the area. (Does the tourist industry need a re-design? Should tourists participate in fun local things that only locals know at this point instead of boring sight seeing tours?)

So you might ask, well why didn’t you just hire individuals from other neighborhoods to create adventures for your site? This is what we started to realize as well. However, the current business was designed to be centered around the ‘cheat day’ idea (branding, logo, marketing strategy, etc.). After realizing that people didn’t care about the ‘cheat day’, that from market research the Four Hour Body community in SF was relatively small, and that people just wanted to have more fun by partaking in social adventures that incorporate the specifics of a location with perhaps a type of competition we started to change course.

LifeSpiced was born.