At KickoffLabs we used them to handle a bunch of routing on behalf of our hosted customers.

The timing was less than ideal for sure.

However they arranged a good support system with the folks at Fly.io. We’ve already transitioned new customers to it and they are helping to migrate existing sites and certs next week.

I think it’s a risk you just have to take, but we learned a lesson that for things that are dependancies for your business it’s good to have a couple of alternatives lined up or working side by side. :)

We don't actually force anything. We could, of course, check to see if you liked us on Facebook... but even that's a loose check since it's easy to unlike something anyway.

The goal is to help others improve their launches with the email course and for us to build a larger audience... through Facebook, Twitter, and Email.

Josh Ledgard Co-Founder - KickoffLabs

It's good feedback that we should highlight the free course and encouragement we give you a chance to opt into.

http://www.landingpages107.com specifically. It's a 10 part email course with 9 worksheets you can use to improve your conversion rates. There are some subtle ads in that email course for our service... but we get great feedback on the content of the course.

When it comes to viral gains. It doesn't really matter much if you don't have many followers... sometimes it just takes one. :)

This is the sort of contest a lot of our customers have been asking to run lately and we're experimenting by running one ourselves so we can improve our own customer experience.

To me, what made what he was doing appealing was that he wasn't directly soliciting people. He made the arrow and the sign. He wasn't harassing anyone in line. I think that makes all the difference.

Absolutely. The pure non-aggression of his method was brilliant.

Agreed.

I like the idea of getting feedback on competitors apps. :)

That turned out really cool!

The real verdict of the video success has much more to do with analytics than individual opinions.

Of course, since we just posted it, we won't have good results of our A/B test (against a static image slideshow) for a week or so.

I would never ever put any of my friends through the pain of watching that thing - no offense.

I also really need an unbounce alternative. I'll have a look at your site when I get some downtime.

The big problem is you put every feature tahat you have in your app into the video. Thats why its kind of blah. Focus on one tihng you do based on which suorce the user comes from.

If he's coming from HN then just test your business should be enough. The user will find the other features as he explores.

I'm not saying it couldn't be improved. Just saying that what matters is if, overall, our conversion rate is better with it.

Then, if it is, we can spend more time, money, and effort on the video. If we had spent $6,000 to learn that having an explainer video doesn't help... I'd be pissed. But if I see an improvement over the next week then I can invest more.

Any feedback on our video at www.bidkat.com? We did it at basically no cost and I'm curious if you think we did any better.

This is brilliant. How did you do this at no cost ?

This is really good.

Thanks! We did it ourselves over a couple of weekends. The voice actor we found on a voice actor forum, I did the script and our designer did the flash animation. This was the first animation that we did so we tried hard to make it look professional.

Once I signed up for PowToon the pricing for our plan was $57 a month... which gives you 20 video exports.

I thought about music... but after an hour trying to find a good match I gave up and figured I could add music later.

Voicebunny lets you select gender and add notes. They also seem to have a process that reads your notes and looks for the ideal talent.

Our first recording came back a little too whimsical. So we asked for a revision to have it more profesional sounding and got it for $16 more dollars. Still within our $200 budget.