Side Projects And Joint Ventures

Sometimes everything is going so fast that my comfort zone is getting few steps behind the current affairs. So from time to time it gets scary, but then again it should be this way.

For example, this weekend I met with few other guys with whom we decided to form a kind of a joint venture and try things out with direct marketing. It’s going to be the side project, although it probably will require more investment than any of my current membership sites do.

The most interesting thing is that direct marketing is not too popular in Lithuania. In fact I could count all the direct marketing letters that I’ve gotten in my entire life on the fingers of one of my hands and this fact will either be our bless or damn.

To tell you the truth, I don’t even think that there are any ad agencies here who would use any scientific advertising methods or throughly test the effectiveness of their ads.

The best example of this is my ex-employer’s view on the advertising.

Once, after reading “Scientific Advertising” by Claude Hopkins, I’ve tried to implement everything that I have learned. The task was simple in itself — design an ad for a 1/3 newspaper’s page.

So I ran through my swipe file choosing and translating the best headlines that would fit our product, writing a simple copy and making some kind of a system so that we could finally see if our ads do work (they’ve never done that before.)

It was done and I was quite happy with it, in fact I was more than sure that it will pull. But then it was time to show it to the small-heads-small-balls from above and their answer was really simple:

“We don’t need that much text. Just put a cute picture, our logo and a telephone number. It will work!”

In fact it never did, nor will it… So I said I won’t do it, because it’s the dumbest way to spend money which resulted in a little bit of shouting and cursing. But in the end they did it themselves — picture, logo, phone number.

How many calls did we receive after it was printed?

Hell knows. Actually, there’s no way to know, because there’s no way they want to test it.

Which reminds me of the other story which my boss once told me, thinking that it was the smartest thing he ever did in his entire life…

“You know, Adomas, once I had a really original idea. I’ve decided to rent a billboard with only our company’s name on it. Nothing else… Just the name! And you know what? It did wonders. In 3 months I got like 4 calls asking what the hell do we do! That’s what I want from you. I want these kind of ideas!”

I’m serious. This is word for word what he told me.

And do you know how much did he paid for that billboard?

For all of you US readers let’s say it cost him $10,000 for 3 months. Basically one caller just asking what our firm does, cost him $2,500…

Now that’s a great idea!

I got a little side-tracked here… So back to my story.

Most likely we are going to blast our very first direct mail test campaign next week. It’s going to cost us, but let’s hope that it won’t reach $2,500 per lead.

To tell you the truth I’m really optimistic about this whole thing. If it’s going to work we already agreed that we will reinvest everything that we earn back to the business and it’s going to be awesome and the profits would be far from anything near what I’ve earned.

But if everything flops — the experience that I’ll gain will be more valuable than the cost of trying this thing out.

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