As a startup your time is extremely limited and as such at Funifi we always strive to find tasks that require the least amount of time that will yield the maximum results in anything we experiment with.

We had discussed the idea of running a parenting test many times before but never really gave it a priority, as we were concerned that the time required would not be worth the results we would achieve.

The motivation/justification to finally take it forward came after a recent fundraising trip to London where I was lucky enough to attend a Product Hunt meet up at the Google Campus in Shoreditch.

The keynote speaker was Juan Cartagena from Traity who are on a mission to create a world where we can trust one another.

Juan spoke of the various hurdles Traity faced, as all startup’s do starting out, but what stood out in his keynote was the hustle to their first million users.

As Juan put it…

“Telling an investor you have 1 million anything is a great conversation starter”

and they did whatever was necessary to get their first million signups, even if at times it was not what they really wanted to be doing.

So as you can guess, Traity’s initial traction came largely from those familiar personality tests we have all seen around the web and filling our Facebook news feeds.

I was embarrassed for humanity when we started researching into running personality tests and how popular they were.

-Traity CEO Juan Cartagena-

Juan joked that he was embarrassed for humanity and was shocked when he found out “personality test” was the no. 1 searched term in the early days of Facebook graph search, as well as one of the top searched for apps in the Apple & Google Play app stores after the usual suspects such as Facebook, Twitter & Instagram.

Hearing the success from a fellow startup, as they “hacked” their way to traction and now knowing what was possible, we took the plunge…

The Test

When we decided to run the test it just so happened that we had an article prepared to go out on our blog that week asking 6 questions, each with 4 possible answers (a, b, c or d) which gave you a parenting style at the end of the article.

The results depended on which answer you selected most frequently for the questions between (a, b, c or d). If the majority of your answers were “A” you would have the parenting style “A”.

For us at Funifi this was not an ideal setup for a parenting test as we had discussed that as a company we would like to take a more serious approach to the parenting test, but we all agreed that this light-hearted quick fix would end up being our test.

If this test was successful it would justify the time to spend creating a more thorough parenting test, working with psychologists & child care professionals.

As you can see there was a lot of testing going on ☺

With Wordpress already setup for our blog and the test ready to go, all we then needed was a simple survey plugin and add a little design for a Funifi finish!

Question 2 of 6

We spent a little extra time on the design as we wanted to separate ourselves from the ordinary personality test and as a team we strongly believe in the power of good design.

We wanted our test to be fast, engaging and shareable!

So here is what your results looked like

A separate page was created for each of the 4 parenting styles

And here is what we prepared to share your results through your social channels

Different images were prepared for Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest for the test itself and for each of the 4 test results.

Distribution

Once we had the test setup we were ready to go, but what about distribution?

We started out for a lack of a better word by spamming all our family & friends through Facebook chat and encouraged them to take the test & share the results. (I think I chatted to more people on that specific day than I have since I created my Facebook account).

We also all shared our results and tagged friends who were in our target demographic on the post for them & their friends to notice.

This created a good buzz amongst friends and acquaintances and helped start a viral loop, as a lot of mutual friends were seeing the test pop-up on various friends’ feeds and as a result took the test themselves and shared it with their network.

Halfway through the test we realised we could do more for social sharing and introduced a pop-up to encourage sharing the results. After the user spent 10s on the results page they were greeted with a message to share their results that had been optimised for Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest.

We then started targeting bloggers & parents through twitter encouraging them to take the test, as well as putting out our results through other various distribution channels such as Reddit & various parenting forums.

This worked great and gave us good traction but our target market for the campaign was UK and having our headquarters based in Cyprus we wanted the campaign to have a little more focus.

So as a final push we setup a highly targeted PPC campaign with Facebook ads and set a budget of $150.

We targeted a small closely knit demographic in the UK in order to try and encourage the same viral loop we had seen amongst our friends & family, which gave us the cherry on top!

There were other small adjustments made here and there but that was the setup in a nutshell.

What started out as a test of a test turned out to be a really successful experiment that we will most definitely be running again in the future as user aquisition becomes more and more of a priority for us at Funifi.

So without further ado the result…