This past weekend, I had an idea (yes, it does happen every now and then).  I decided that I no longer wanted to create proposals.  So, I set up a landing page and offered customers a money back guarantee: “If we don’t generate a single sales lead, we’ll refund your money.”

I set up ads in Linkedin and spent about $25 bucks and I generated absolutely no leads.  People visited the page, but no one signed up for the offer.

There could be a number of reasons for this:

1.       The copywriting wasn’t good.  Perhaps I need a stronger headline.

2.       The form that I was asking people to fill out was too long.

3.       Too small of a sample size.

4.       For this type of offer to work most effectively, I’d need to build a relationship with the person who lands on the page first.

5.       It’s just a bad idea.

I’ll probably spend a few more bucks experimenting with this offer mostly because I really dislike writing proposals and I think it would add much more value.

Back to the Point

In the old days, circa 1998, in order to test an idea like this you needed to take out an ad in a publication, or send out a bunch of direct mail letters and post cards.  This would cost a few hundred bucks and a couple of weeks to test.

Now you can know of how an idea is going to turn out in a weekend with less than $100 and some knowledge in a popular advertising platform such as Linkedin.