It's fairly subjective at this stage, and is more of a judgment call than a science. I went with the following assumptions while putting down the 25% metric:
* Conversion rates on vanilla sign up pages (with not a lot on the page) are generally not that high. I'd read that 8-10% was common.
* Users already searching for charades online would be motivated to check out the ad (in my mind, this justified looking at a higher rate)
* Since this was SCM based, it was not granular from a demographic perspective - likely had a mix of early adopters, mainstream users, etc.
Hope this helps. I'd love to hear how others are doing this.
LOL, yes I agree that my writing was a bit dry. But we all play charades, and are passionate about it. That said, I think there are enough examples as well of startups that have succeeded where the founders themselves were not part of the primary target user community, but they developed a deep enough understanding of the users needs to build a successful product.
Incidentally, I OH this on Facebook: We tend to underestimate long term impact of reason and short term impact of passion.
Thanks for sharing this on HN, I was surprised when I suddenly saw a spike in traffic and tweets. ;)
I certainly think the Valley is more open to discussing failures and what worked and what didn't. In my experience, it's been hard to have honest, clear discussions in India with other entrepreneurs about challenges being faced and what people are doing to address them. There's just a lot of noise in the startup ecosystem. That said, all this is maturing, and I'm sure it'll get better soon.
Agree completely. We did run a number of phone and face to face interviews, but in hindsight I feel we didnt reach out to the right demographic. This is something we could have done more of. Thanks for the feedback.
Hope this helps. I'd love to hear how others are doing this.