I did a text interview on IndieHackers.com with in 2017 ​

What came out of it improved my conversion rate for years to come... ​

First, some background -- It's a little cringe for me to go back and read but still some good nuggets in there. At the time I was 29 and my travel business was doing $125,000/mo. ​ I had no idea my life and my business was about to come crashing down on me one year later (I'll tell that story another time, it's a doozy). ​

From the article:

"First think about how you're going to distribute your product, then work backwards from there. ​ I borrowed $10,000 from one of our largest vendors, who had a lot to gain by helping me create Sourced Adventures [my former business]... ​

Within a couple months I'd sold 5,000 tickets to our first ski bus trip [...] The cash from that first season pretty much gave me enough to keep it going from there. I had no idea it was going to work. In fact, I was pretty sure people would not be interested since we had no reputation online." -- ​

Here is the full article: https://indiehackers.com/post/identifying-consumer-demand-before-building-my-travel-service-73l8NFmUIyOnmoJo42Nj… ​

What happened next was very lucky and gave our conversion rate a big boost... ​

The article ended up on the front page of Hacker News for a couple days ​ (separate thing but several people tore my website to shreds in the comments which is still one of my favorite bootstrapper moments to this day) ​

​https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14763831… ​

Suddenly I received a mysterious email from an anonymous gmail account. ​

It said, "hey I saw your interview on Indie Hackers and I have some advice for you. Can I give you a call?" ​ At first I thought it was spam but it was juuust mysterious enough that I had to see... ​

I jumped on the phone with this stranger and he told me that he used to be the head of growth for one of the largest travel websites in the world. I won't say the name here but think of one of the biggest online travel sites that everyone knows and uses, it was one of those. ​

He told me that one of the things he spent a ton of time testing was the call to action for the book button. ​

He had tested this over hundreds of millions of sessions and said of everything that he tested "Check Availability" was the highest converting call to action. ​

I had no way independently verify this as he prefered to stay anonymous and wouldn't give me his name. ​ But for some reason I believed him. ​ I checked the site he claimed to have worked for and indeed every book button was "Check Availability" rather than "Book Now" or something else. ​

I immediately went and changed all of our CTAs and sure enough our conversion rate popped. ​

He was right! It worked! ​

I'm trying to improve my "building in public" skills... It doesn't come very naturally to me yet but when I think back on stories like this it just goes to show how much good can come from putting your work out there or increasing your "luck surface area" as they say. ​ In this case I would have never received this anonymous tip had I not shared openly. ​

There is obviously a flip side to this as well, as we all know, but deep down I feel it's worth it to put your work out there into the world and see what comes back to you. ​

Lastly, to my mystery man from 7 years ago... If you're out there and somehow you read this post I just wanted to say, thank you sir!