This is some question I asked myself before calling it quits with my offline approach. Atleast today I am talking in retrospect. The time I asked myself this question, I didn’t even clearly know what online strategy would work. Which only made me defend the offline approach harder.

I do not have qualms revealing stats, but in this case we haven’t done any segregation based on user profiles. I know that we are signing-up college students too. But what % of the total sign-up or how it looks against the backdrop of past numbers I do not know. If you feel, not all college students are potential users of Muziboo, fair enough. I have been to Music schools too where everyone is a possible customer. But I didn’t see spectacular results there either!

As I mentioned in the post, our efforts in that direction were not totally fruitless. We signed-up about hundred users a month. But the following few questions I could never answer in the affirmative which helped me make the decision.
Does the return justify the cost my investment?
Does my number look good considering the size of the possible market?
Is the approach scalable without adding manpower?

Also, another philosophical question we asked ourselves was ‘Do we want to sell the product or do we want to evolve the product before selling?’ Yeah, it is true that we all make products that scratch our itch, but asking oneself if that product can cater to the needs of a large enough audience to make a business is imperative. Sometimes with the basic product idea and a few tweaks here and bits of additions there carried out with the help of user inputs, one might actually be able to evolve a product that caters to a much larger audience. For an established market, the ‘Make & Sell’ approach offered by offline marketing would work. Otherwise it may prove to be a resource sink.

The funnel to money in a business is something like this:

Appealing to target audience
Possible customers remembering to check you out when there is a need
Signing-up if the product is interesting
Paying if the service is compelling.

In an offline approach, the % conversion from the first step to the second would be pretty low. The reason is that there is a wide gap between the time they get exposed to your service and the time they feel the need to check you out. Whereas, while online they are just a click away from experiencing your product. Also, the cost of an ‘appeal’ is so high offline that you may not repeat your approach with the same audience. Whereas in an online approach, it doesn’t cost much to make yourself visible to the same set of audience again and again for brand recollection.

If I was in your position, I would try to reach the possible market online than offline. Have you tried marketing online? Are you happy with the returns on your offline approach. If yes, why not recruit more people across cities to market your product as fast across geographies and establish yourself faster?

If you don’t have a problem with revealing the stats, can you tell me, now what % of your users are students. Like, for our case, at interviewstreet, we know that all the students are our potential customers and they will get benefited by taking a interview.

But for muziboo, only a small percentage of the students will be interested in music right? Maybe is that the reason offline didn’t work for you?