Could have been better - Clockk Insight softlaunch in review

We soft-launched Clockk Insight on Thursday February 2, 2023.

Why “soft-launched”? We tested the software as much as we could, but there’s nothing like real users hammering your software. Our soft-launch plan was to announce Clockk Insight on Twitter. Sign-ups get 3 months free.

(We don’t actually have a way to bill users yet, so 3 months gives us lots of time to build a billing system!)

With the soft launch, I promised the Twitterverse regular updates on our growth. With that, I bring you our first "build in public" post!

Metrics

First, the good stuff: metrics.

This is the Twitter post announcing Clockk Insight:

An email a day keeps the timesheets away. 🍎

We just launched the easiest-to-use time tracking tool ever. And it’s FREE for 3 months ($18 value).

10 minutes of setup gets you a daily email showing you everything you did yesterday.

Like & comment “wow” and I’ll DM the details.

— Paul Doerwald (@pauldoerwald) February 2, 2023

At the time of this writing, it had 21 retweets, 9 quote tweets, 68 likes, 48 comments (38 “wow”) and 11.7K impressions.

I am pleased with how well this tweet performed. In fact, this is my best-performing tweet ever. I called in every favour and twitter-friend I had to promote this tweet. Bear in mind that I only had about 430 followers and the @clockkcom account had about 1240 followers.

Now, let’s dig a little deeper. What did all that glorious Twitter action yield?

Hypefury’s auto-DM campaign tool that we sent 49 auto-DMs inviting users to sign up to Clockk Insight.

These are the clicks on the invite link:

Google Analytics agrees, showing 13 new users and 35 sessions connected to our utm_ parameters.

Now let’s get into the real meat: conversions to sign-up. Intercom reports 4 users signed up with the “softlaunch” campaign. (Intercom shows 6, but 2 of them are internal users). I also know that 2 others signed up due to the invite, but they didn’t click the link. That makes a total of 6 sign-ups that I can attribute to the softlaunch campaign.

This is what the funnel ends up looking like:

The final value — 6 on-boarded — means that they installed at least one of Clockk’s trackers. Our long-term on-board rate has been around 50%, so 100% is excellent. I would have been happy with 50%. The burden of getting Clockk set up is quite high. We need you to install 2 trackers plus email and calendar. These are not easy steps.

I also picked up 17 Twitter followers. That means my conversion rate to followers was a lot higher than my conversion to users.

Analysis

I’m pleased that my tweet performed so well. Like I said — it’s my best performing tweet ever. Yet, in spite of it doing so well, I can’t call it a viral tweet. My friends did most of the RTs and comments. The tweet did get traction beyond my friends, but not at the level I hoped.

I can think of several reasons:

• The offer (3 months free, $18 value) wasn’t good enough.
• The mechanism (auto-DM campaign) wasn’t the right choice for this promotion.
• The tweet itself was underwhelming (e.g. bad hook) and didn’t tell enough about the value behind.
• I (@pauldoerwald) am too much of an unknown for the tweet to gain traction.

All these reasons are true to one degree or another.

User feedback

4 of 6 new users gave us useful feedback:

• One was unsure if he could close the Clockk tracker window (answer is “yes, of course!”).
• Another expressed concern that Clockk might feel like “big brother”. This is a fair point, but that’s the subject of another post.
• Another found a bug that was preventing him from seeing half the data we tracked!
• Two users noticed that our value proposition — an email every day — doesn’t work on your first day after signup! OOPS!

The most exciting feedback was this:

I was just in a marketing team meeting telling everyone about @clockkcom - Funny, not everyone loves time management and insight as much as I do. Maybe I was gushing a BIT MUCH.

— Sandy Hubbard - Marketing Strategist & B2B Advisor (@sandyhubbard) February 7, 2023

This is the kind of feedback that keeps our small team going.

Next steps

“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

I’m not going to lie. This first kick at the can was a bit disappointing. I don’t know what I expected, but I hoped for more than 6 sign-ups.

On the plus side, we now know that a Twitter campaign with 11.7K impressions should yield at least 6 sign-ups. We have a baseline to improve from.

These are our next marketing projects:

• A re-engagement campaign — we have about 1000 sign-ups to Clockk Time (the O.G. Clockk), most of whom aren’t active any more. We’re going send targeted emails to different sub-groups inviting them back.
• A Product Hunt launch — because every product deserves its Product Hunt launch day!
• Search & display ads — We have a unique spin: You’re a Toggl user? Great! Keep using Toggl, but add Clockk Insight for pain-free, accurate timesheets.
• Build in public — with this first post, I commit to building Clockk Insight in public.

Meanwhile we’re continuing our efforts on social media and content marketing.