“This is *ucking genius.” — so why did only a few hundred signup?

“This is *ucking genius” — an early signups feedback

TL;DR — the response from signups was overwhelmingly positive 👍🏻, but, few referrals because we used the wrong referral campaign 👎🏻.

What we did

So, it’s been a week since we released our new signup page 🤗 (shout-out to Freddie Altman for the design).

And it’s already been a week of highs and lows.

We started strongly — reaching out to all of our friends/connections to share the news, we hit a few hundred signups pretty quickly.

Our eyes were glued to watching the graph showing the current number of signups — delighted every time we hit a milestone 💯.

This continued until Friday, and out-of-the blue, people started directly reaching out to us with their feedback:

“Freddie, this is dope” “Bloody genus mate. Love it” (sic) “Honestly dude, awesome idea” “Already referred mum. She thinks it’s brilliant”

But then, as we suspected, signups dropped considerably once we hit the weekend. A combination of other weekend priorities 💃🏻🕺 and, as we later found out, the wrong referral campaign.

As a result, we realised we would need to switch over to another referral campaign before really pushing for more growth (read why below).

Quick win of the week — social suicide, but we invited all of our Facebook friends to like our company Facebook page. It increased our likes from 5 to 140+ in one evening 📈.

Lessons learnt

We tested our concept with friends and family in the lead up to launch. We were fairly confident that people understood the concept and would approve.

However, with more exposure to users in the last week we learnt:

The perception of Homewards is split by either a) “I have to spend anyway, so why not get rewarded for it” or b) “why would I ‘spend to save’, when I could just not spend in the first place”. We should have tested our waitlist campaign more. Whilst good in theory, it was confusing and ambiguous (two things we absolutely do not want to be). It wasn’t abundantly clear the benefit of referring your family (and friends) onto Homewards. Annoyingly, we also hadn’t realised this specific campaign didn’t support a “share with Facebook Messenger/ Whatsapp” button. This meant far too many clicks to refer others 🙄. Don’t get caught up with “when’s the best time to post on social media” etc. It’s better to take our time, make sure what we’re posting is right, not when we think it’ll get the most coverage — engagement > eyeballs.

What we will do next

Build a community page — we’re trying to build a company to help more people onto the housing ladder. We shouldn’t (and can’t) do it alone. Therefore we want to create a community page so you can get more involved, ask your burning questions, and get an insight into our future plans 👀. Change the referral campaign — the waitlist referral campaign was unclear 🙊. Instead, we‘ve switched to a referral milestone campaign so you know exactly what you get for your referrals — fully transparent 💪. More Homewards Medium content — 1) we will cover our rationale behind starting Homewards and why we believe it should exist 😀 2) the change in referral campaign and how you can make the most of it 📢.

Thanks to

Our partners, friends, and family for putting up with our constant barrage of all things Homewards related

Our Linkedin network for spreading the word of Homewards

Aisling Browne — for top tips on growing community

Osei Downes — for including us in his write-up of 3 tools you need to use if you want to buy a home 🏠

Dave M — our highest signup referrer so far🏆

And if you haven’t already signed up — https://www.homewards.io

Thanks,

Ben