Jeremy Weisz 9:00
So I don’t know if you remember at the time, what was on your options to do? And then why you chose PickFu.
John Li 9:08
Ah, so the funny thing with PickFu is that it wasn’t actually the first business we’ve started, we started a number of businesses. And PickFu was actually a tool we built for ourselves to help our decision-making process along the way. So back then we were two bootstrapped entrepreneurs, we’re both developers and product people. And so we would always just have these debates about hey, what do you think about this? Or what do you think about this is, should we go with this design this design this headline, that headline, and we would debate it, and then we’d always try to get feedback from our friends and family. And they’re super supportive, and they’re biased, and at some point, they kind of get tired of just, yeah, poopoo that’s great. Good job, right. Keep it going. So, we found this opportunity to build on top of tap into these consumer panels. We built the first MVP of PickFu long time ago, used it for ourselves got really fast feedback, so it served our needs. And then we just launched it out to the world didn’t really do any marketing, put it on the side, and it just kept growing over time. So funny thing with these side projects is that over time, the side projects become the main project. And that’s what happened a couple of years back. So then we focused our efforts on PickFu.
Jeremy Weisz 10:23
I love it. We’re going to look at the book cover here. And I even remember, and I don’t know the full story, John, maybe you know it. But even with Tim Ferriss book, The Four Hour Workweek, he talks at some point about how he split-tested the titles, by running ads to different ones. And that one won, now, that’s a much more difficult way to do it, you have to be familiar with Google ads, and then you got to get them all up and running. So this is a very much easier solution for something like that. Do you know that story?
John Li 10:55
Yeah, no, definitely. And I think Tim Ferriss has mentioned, I don’t know, something like PickFu before.
Jeremy Weisz 11:03
Maybe you should try PickFu.
John Li 11:04
Yeah, I mean, it’s basically a shortcut way of doing that, right, instead of having to set up a Facebook Ads account, and then run a whole bunch of different variations and throw a bunch of money pushing those variations. You could just run PickFu instead. The other downside of running Facebook ads to test I mean, you get the clicks, but you don’t understand the why. And I think that’s how we like to differentiate, which is that every single panelist on PickFu gives a written response explaining their thinking. So you can see that they’re real people, our systems have something to validate that they’re real people and paying attention, and we use that as well. And so you get, I like to joke that people come for the votes, but stay for the responses.
Jeremy Weisz 11:48
Yeah, that makes sense. Because it’s like, oh, it’s just like, they could just blindly and I don’t know if some of them are paid on the back end to like, fill out these surveys, but you want them not just oh, just mass clicking yes or no, or whatever, and just collecting a check. So that’s great to know that they’re leaving a response. And you can read through the why. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So let’s look at this for a second. So there’s three options. Okay. And this is, just to give you a context, it’s a book cover, or what is that?
John Li 12:22
Yeah, so this is a book cover. I mean, authors and publishing the publishing industry in general is one of our big industries. And that’s because PickFu provides a way to test your book title and book cover before you publish. Right, because they say no one judges a book by its cover, but I mean, they do. Yeah, they do. Yeah, exactly. So PickFu is a great way for authors and publishers to test these book covers. In what we’re seeing here are three different Italian phrasebook book covers.
Jeremy Weisz 12:54
I just want to say Ian Garlic, if you’re listening this you should because he actually posted something on LinkedIn, you’re gonna get a bunch of responses, but people are biased and whatever. So checkout PickFu put your book cover on PickFu and get some responses. Exactly. So we’re looking at this cover which is a Italian phrase book for those of you listen, you can watch the video and for travelers and then there’s a subhead 1400 Common Italian phrases to travel in Italy with confidence with a picture of Italy kind of a cartoony picture. And then it says talking Italian at the bottom. That’s the first choice. And so if you’re watching us try and guess which one won out or which one do you maybe use like one that didn’t went out? But yeah, um, here’s another one that says easy Italian phrase book, and then the subhead is over 1500 common phrases for everyday use and travel. And then there’s a kind of picture of a coliseum there with lingo mastery at the bottom. So you can check that one out. And then we have Rick Steves. This is a totally different concept. And all of them are kind of totally different here at Rick Steves at the top and says Italian in big letters and this says phrasebook and dictionary. I’m not even gonna answer because I actually saw what the answer was. But take a look. option one, option two, option three. Do you remember any why behind this? And I’m gonna pull up. So now you had a chance to choose your favorite out of these three. And here’s the full piece you can see which travel book covers will appeal to my readers and this person. You can see the full pole and everything. And by the way, if you can check this out at pickfu.com and there’s an examples where they have a bunch of examples. You can look through different types of use cases for this. So we’ll click through to the full poll for a second. And you can see the first one, which I mean, I guess, John, I think I would have picked the first one personally. But I’m also biased because I saw what the winner was…
John Li 15:20
Yeah, I thought this was interesting when I saw this because like Rick Steves, in some circles is a very well-known name around travel. And so I thought that this was a pretty interesting test of like, brand versus content, because you look at the Rick Steves cover, it has his name, but it doesn’t really have anything else. It has Italian and just a phrasebook and dictionary. So I feel like this is kind of a test of whether the Rick Steves name can really just sell the book by itself. Whereas the test kind of shows that it doesn’t.
Jeremy Weisz 15:56
Someone said this, I mean, some people did answer that it looks like so if you’re looking at it, those responses, you can see all the responses from A, B and C and someone said in that what you’re saying with that responses, they recognize Rick Steve’s name.
John Li 16:12
Yeah. So maybe there’s affinity to the name if they recognize it. But then overall, more people preferred a, because it actually talks about, it actually tells you what you’re getting right. Like 14, you’re getting 1400 Common Italian phrases, like you’re selling the confidence. There’s a lot more to it that it’s pitching than just a phrasebook.
Jeremy Weisz 16:34
Yeah. So, you can see some of the responses here. And it’s just interesting to look through why people chose that. We’ll go through another one here. There was another one I have pulled up. Again, what are we looking at here? This is another example.
John Li 17:02
Yeah, so we offer a couple of different poll types, right, like typically a poll as a single question. But then respondents can answer in a couple of different ways. You can compare multiple things like up to eight images, video, text, audio. In this case, we’re showing a clip test. So you can upload an image and have the panelists targeted right, and this poll is targeted towards women, you can have the panelists click on the images based on your prompt. And you can even have them click up to 10 times. So this poll here that we’re showing, it’s a set of nine, I think in Amazon, they’re called secondary images, right. So there are the images on the side of the Amazon listing where when you hover over them, you get a lot of sort of benefits, supporting images showing different benefits of the product that you’re looking on. Here we have a square of nine secondary images. And the prompt is, click on this image said three times based on what catches your eye first, second, and third. And so we put this to the panelists, they click three times. Based on the prompt, they write down, why explaining why and then what you get is this nice heat map of this set of images that show you exactly what people what really drew people’s attention.
Jeremy Weisz 18:23
Is this a deodorant? A natural deodorant.
John Li 18:27
Yeah, these are supporting images for a natural deodorant. Interesting. So this would be, if you’re in the marketing department for this product, then now you understand sort of what is drawing, not only which image is probably most popular and most eye-catching. So you can use that information to order the images or if you wanted to swap in a different image, this would be useful data to do that. But also within each image. What is the actual thing that is drawing the eye of the potential buyer?
Jeremy Weisz 19:00
Yeah, like it’s interesting. The last one, a bunch of people are drawn into her armpit.
John Li 19:04
Like straight into the armpit. Yeah, yeah. Like, like the point of contact, right?
Jeremy Weisz 19:10
That’s interesting. So this is example. So that like from an e-commerce use case, this not only shows which image but also where they’re looking as well. Right, exactly. There was another one that we are talking about, John, with Thrasio. You what happened with that?
John Li 19:31
So yeah, one of the other verticals, large verticals, we service our people who sell on Amazon, you can probably go to the resources, case studies there. And we have case studies.
Jeremy Weisz 19:47
I’m on the e-commerce page.
John Li 19:49
I’ll try to find it for you. Well, so yeah, one of our one of our biggest verticals our people are onto For those who sell on Amazon, we like to joke that we help Amazon sellers know what sells before they sell it. And the reason we’re able to do that is because Amazon sellers use PickFu to test like split test their main images off Amazon kind of using PickFu as a private sandbox. Because poll results usually come back in under an hour. And definitely like, by the end of the day, they’re able to quickly test different main images for their Amazon listings, which will lead to greater click-through rates, and therefore greater sales. So yeah, there’s the threat to case study right there. Now the crazy thing with Thrasio so there’s this if you think about Amazon sellers as this world of mom and pop sellers, right, but just selling onto the Amazon marketplace. There’s this concept of Amazon aggregators, I’m not sure if you’ve heard of it. Yeah. And so they’re the large corporations who come in buy up these Mom and Pop listings and then try to grow those businesses through scales of economy that like economies of scale and other stuff. Thrasio one of the first products that they bought is this product called Angry Orange so you can see on the screen it was a good product with a moderate bottle design.
Jeremy Weisz 21:20
You can see, like emoji mad face here at the bottom, it literally.
John Li 21:31
Hey, I think that’s what they were doing. Like literally it almost looks like a hand-drawn orange, like emoji. And so their hypothesis when they bought this listing on Amazon, this Amazon listing was that product is great, good reviews really could use a rebranding, so they purchased the listing. And yeah, we have video from their Head of Brand, who was talking through this, where they went through over 100 different designs for the rebranding. They spent a ton of resources internal design resources internally, I should it be this color, this color, this design and so on. And then once they narrowed down their finalists, they use pic food to validate the right the design that they ended up using, which is this bright orange color. Bright orange color. To me, I love Sriracha, it almost reminds me of like a Sriracha bottle, right like with the bright red with like a bright color with the white lettering and everything. And they were saying that the rebrand the retooling to make, that orange bottle would have costed them I think $50,000 or more so to validate that it was going to be worth it. They ran a bunch of PickFu polls comparing, like I don’t know if they compared the old packaging with what they were thinking of for the new packaging validated. Then they went ahead with a rebranding launched it and I think overnight at 10x the sales because the packaging was just so vibrant. And it’s a competitive marketplace when you’re shopping on Amazon right? You’re probably not searching for Angry Orange you’re probably searching for pet deodorizer. And so when you see sort of this eye-popping bottle, really catchy image, then that compels the click which then compels the sale.
Jeremy Weisz 23:27
Yeah, and I want to talk about a gaming option for a second but I will mention there’s a interview I did and he should check out PickFu also with Rick Cesari and Rick talked about really what he did was he helped do the marketing and build brands like George Foreman grill Sonicare toothbrush, juice, man juicer, Orange Glow, and that’s what this reminds me of is Orange Glow. So Rick checkout PickFu for your whatever companies are working on now. But you also helped a gaming company as well.
John Li 24:04
Yeah, I’m not sure if we have a written case study on it. But it was a company called Machine Zone, really large game publisher. So on the case studies, we have a couple other ones. Like don’t talk about Conor McGregor, we can talk about Sure. All right, let’s talk about Conor McGregor. That’s always fun.
Jeremy Weisz 24:21
I was watching a UFC video the other day of like watching like, regular people messing with the wrong person. The person was like a UFC fighter and they were just being jerks to him and he didn’t want to fight them but it just pulled me into watch the moment, like what’s gonna happen to these poor people mess up the wrong person.
John Li 24:42
Nice. Yeah, we can talk about this. So what I was going to talk about was that PickFu was used on the marketing, mobile gaming app like launch side for testing similar to the Amazon side like testing mobile app icons and mobile screenshots, right for better marketing, but also in the gaming industry, PickFu starting to be used more and more on the creative side, like the product development during the product development phases. So whether you’re selling on Amazon and trying to figure out your product packaging and sort of the product you want to sell. Similarly, on the gaming side, we have game companies using PickFu to test their character designs and their character themes and so on. And so what you have on the screen here with Beetroot Labs is kind of a case study of that, where they had the rights to use the Conor McGregor image, right. And you can see that they got the rights for Conor McGregor, they were building a game where it was Conor McGregor, obviously, as the main character, but then there were other you can’t just have Conor McGregor, I guess you could, he probably says you could, but you got to have other characters to support Conor McGregor and so they were trying to figure out which characters to include in the game. And so they ran a whole bunch of pig food tests of like, okay, do you prefer this character, this character as a supporting cast? And so they were trying to use? Yeah, that one that you have highlighted? I think his name is Spectre. They needed to figure out which character to put as like second billing on the main character of screen. So that you see on that dystopia con? Yeah. So you have Conor McGregor on one side, balanced out by Spectre on the other side. So they use PickFu, to try to figure out which kind of character designs resonated there. And then also, they use PickFu to figure out the app icon, right. So obviously, they were going to promote Conor McGregor. So they put Conor McGregor there. But then how do you present Conor McGregor? So they tried a bunch of different designs with different tattoo colors, vests, hand positions, and so on, before they finalized on the app icon that they ended up using?
Jeremy Weisz 26:51
Yeah, and these game companies are investing sometimes millions of dollars in this stuff. So absolutely. Why not get some actual data from people?
John Li 27:00
Yeah, exactly. And so this is a fun case study. This is a fun story to hear about.
Jeremy Weisz 27:06
I’m curious, John, from risk perspective, if any of these campaigns that people ran, which one is surprised you or Justin the most. And I also just want to mention to you think about that. Carl, big shout out to Epic Made, you know, they help companies make animations and NFT’s. And so this would be a cool platform for them to test their NFT’s like which ones they think are better. So Carl, you can check this out as well. And people could check out Epic Made. Have any campaigns surprise you guys the most of as far as packaging or look or feel or comments from people?
John Li 27:52
Almost all of them honestly, like I think, because we’re tapping into people who are just people, right, like they’re unbiased. A lot of times what the reasons that they give for the preferences that they have are just really surprising. So for example, one of our you big clients is well, not clients, because it’s all self-service. But one of our big users is Mary Ruth Organics they sell. I know David. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, awesome. We were just chatting with some people from their team last week. And so they, Mary Ruth uses PickFu for a lot of different product launches, and particularly when they’re going into a new vertical or a new customer segment that they haven’t been there before, right. So they use these PickFu for like researching, like, packaging designs, and so packaging designs, and claims and so on. And so that’s always super interesting to see how people actually respond to certain types of packaging are not. Things that are always surprising for us are also that when our users use PickFu for competitive research, because it’s kind of a private sandbox. And so a lot of times, if someone’s trying to go into a specific category, it could be like a certain type of genre book, or it could be, you know, some category on Amazon or some gaming category, they’ll often actually pull up assets from the existing larger players in the space, right, like Rick Steves in books, or maybe Angry Orange on Amazon and actually test their assets of existing players in the space against what they’re trying to come up with. And so that’s kind of an like, It’s always fascinating to read the results there and be able to iterate on those.
Jeremy Weisz 29:55
Yeah, well, I want to talk about how the product has changed, but it’s funny because we do Today, John and I through Rise 25, we did a, just a High-Level Mastermind and they happen to have a lot of e-commerce sellers. And so David was there among one of the sellers. So I learned about Mary Ruth. And I think, even a couple of weeks ago, I forgot where I was in, I don’t know if I was in like Whole Foods are somewhere, but I saw their bottles sitting on the shelf, and I was actually wondering, wonder how they came up with that packaging. So now I know, with the help of some users? How has the product changed from when you first started it till now?
John Li 30:38
Massively. So when we first started it, it was only two options, images, 50 people like an only US base. Over the years, we’ve added a lot of different other types of testing. So you can do open-ended testing, which is like the poll that I ran for on the Inspired Insider website, you can test up to eight options, we have the click tests, we added a lot of demographic targeting. So we have demographic targeting for almost any kind of product category books like nonfiction fiction, favorite book types, and genres, favorite game types, and genres. So we’ve added a lot of targeting. What I’m most excited about is that over the past year, we’ve been able to expand our panel. So before it was only about 20,000 people in the US. And now I’m really happy that we’ve been able to expand it to over 10 million in the US and over 5 million internationally. So if you’re developing a product for the Australian market, the German market, the UK market, like we have people there, like about a million each, to sort of help you give feedback. And I know particularly in the gaming and e-commerce space, that what we’ve heard is that German consumers are very, very different from us consumers. So you just can’t just pull one and assume that the other is going to act the same way.
Jeremy Weisz 32:12
John from a marketing perspective, how do you get these companies to hear about you, right? You’ve gotten like I mentioned, into it, fidelity? I mean, at some point, there’s word of mouth. But before that, how do you get people to learn about your platform?
John Li 32:27
Honestly, Jeremy, it’s almost all been word of mouth.
Jeremy Weisz 32:32
Early on, before you add anyone, how are you getting people on the platform?
John Li 32:37
It was word of mouth. I wish I had a different answer for you like it was, it was word of mouth, it was word of mouth between authors using it and then telling their fellow authors, it was word of mouth in the gaming industry, where marketing managers at these large companies would discover it, use it, realize it was kind of a secret sauce to help them do their jobs better. And then we’ve seen so much word of mouth spread within these industries. And as people go from company to company, and they bring this with them and tell everyone else. Same thing. Same thing in e-commerce as well. My co-founder, Justin and we’re both like, we’re Uber geeks about product and stuff. And so are we’re super driven to just develop, provide the highest value product at the best possible price and make it as easy to use as possible. Like that is totally our mission. And that resonates with people. Now over the past few years, we’ve worked with some affiliate in influencer marketing as well. And that has helped that has helped spread but you can’t spread what doesn’t work. Right. And so I think our core focus is always like deliver the best possible product for our customers.
Jeremy Weisz 33:55
Before anyone knew about really early on. Yeah. How did you get some of the first users?
John Li 34:01
We posted to a handful of tech startup blogs. And that was it. And then it kind of Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 34:14
I love to hear about how you decided on pricing.
John Li 34:19
So pricing is by response. It’s $1 per person, we figured that that was the easiest way to deliver value and it’s kind of a choose-your-own-adventure. So we have membership plans, no one needs to be on any kind of subscription. Everyone can just do pay-as-you-go. So 50 person poll will be $50 a 15-person, you can choose between 15 to 500 people so you can get feedback for as little as $15 that cost will scale that dollar per person cost scales. If you’re asking someone to evaluate eight things versus one thing, or if your targeting is like, super, super detailed, then it’s harder to find those people, we pay them more, and so the cost scales there.
Jeremy Weisz 35:11
So how did you decide on this piece? Because I feel like it’s a tough piece. And so if someone obviously wants a lot more responses, then they can get a plan. And they’re just going to save more money off of that, or like a power user. But I don’t know if that’s like industry standard, or how you come up with the free plan plus $1 response? Or have everyone do some lower plan, how did you decide on these plans.
John Li 35:41
But I mean, to be frank, I think we’re still working through the right ways for plans. We’ve tried a handful of different plans in the past, not all of them have resonated with our user base. So honestly, like what we tell our users now is like, don’t start with a plan. You don’t need to start with a plan, like you can sign up for an account for free, you can run your first poll for $15 or less. And if it works for you, you can just do it that way. We’re working through our plans, and we’re constantly talking to our customers and understanding like what details of plans would actually work best for them.
Jeremy Weisz 36:20
So for like an individual author, or someone they may do the free plan, if it’s a publishing company, that maybe has a bunch of authors are constantly testing covers or titles, they may do more professional or team plan.
John Li 36:33
Exactly, exactly. It’s really, you should only go on a plan if you expect to test like in volume, right, but we don’t ever want to gate our service and anyone’s ability to use the product based on a plan. So you don’t need a plan, you can just come on, and just pay as you go.
Jeremy Weisz 36:53
I love to hear, John, throughout the entrepreneurial journey, there’s always challenges that come up. Yeah. And what are some challenges that you’ve had to face in launching PickFu and running PickFu?
John Li 37:11
I think our challenge, one of the biggest challenges for us is in building a tool that is really broadly usable, but then understanding the sets of challenges that different types of customers have, right. And being able to learn, learn their businesses, because our customers, our business owners, right, our customers are entrepreneurs, they’re running businesses, they’re trying to grow their businesses, and different types of businesses obviously have different types of problems. So having to go and learn those industries. I mean, now we feel much more familiar with some with the problems that our customers have. In the beginning. It was definitely like, learn as you go. And yeah, I mean, we’re still always in a discovery phase on that front.
Jeremy Weisz 38:15
What’s the evolution of the team? Obviously, in the beginning, it was you and Justin, who did you need to hire? Or what type of positions did you have to hire as you grew?
John Li 38:27
So we’re close to 20 right now. In the beginning, it was Justin myself doing everything. One of our first hires was customer support person, as the business kind of scaled. And we’ve definitely grown out our customer success team, since then, to be able to, particularly to be able to support sort of the the larger organizations who have more complex needs. Definitely scaled out the marketing side a bit in terms of just being able to create content and assets to help convey our message. And then definitely, as the team has scaled, Justin, myself can’t do all the coding and everything ourselves. So we’ve scaled out the product and developer organizations as well.
Jeremy Weisz 39:16
What are your thoughts on bootstrapping versus raising money?
John Li 39:22
If you asked me say, two years ago, I would have said, never raised money. And I think my stance is softened a bit. Why? With resources, you can do a lot. But raising money always comes with strings, right? Like there’s always an obligation and so I think I feel like we have a much more balanced view now, on the pros and cons of fundraising and sort of what you’re signing up for. I’ve talked to, like, I have a lot of friends and I know a lot of people who have raised money and run their businesses that way. And it’s a different path. And I’m not saying that that path is never going to be like that path is off the table. But I think for now, what they’ve also said to me and Justin, is that if you don’t need to raise money, then don’t because that’s, as they say, it’s a one-way door. Right? Not a two-way door.
Jeremy Weisz 40:32
John, I have one last question. Before I ask it, I just want to point people to check out PickFu. That’s pikfu.com to learn more, and check it out. And my last question is a big win a first proud moment, because starting a company is not easy, right? I mean, you work in a great company, Microsoft, you go off and you just didn’t take a risk, it’s always a risk to start a company, what was the first maybe proud moment or big win that you remember thinking, we are going in the exact direction we should be going?
John Li 41:19
I think for PickFu, I think one of the proudest moments was recognizing individuals from large organizations using the product and getting value from it. That it’s fine to be able to post to say a message board and get a handful of individuals. But when we were able to see that, okay, well, these large, publicly listed recognizable companies have individuals trusting PickFu, to help them with their decision making. And then to actually see them go and launch with that, right like their product or whatever it is that they were testing. Like that was a super proud moment to be able to have a product that we built, be involved in something that we can now see out in the real world. And that’s one of the biggest motivators for us, right? Like, what you said about Mary Ruth and seeing that, that whole foods and there’s other products at whole foods that we walk around and see where like, yeah, they use PickFu and that is so cool.
Jeremy Weisz 42:28
Love it. Thank you, John. Thanks, everyone, for listening everyone. Check it out, pickfu.com and we’ll see you next time.
John Li 42:35
Thanks, Jeremy.
