Breaking Free
Experiments in tech entrepreneurship
Business Launch Preview Part 2: How To Build Trust Online
In: Business Ideas|How To|UniversityTutor.com By: Brian Armstrong
3 Mar 2008I’ve been working like mad man lately on this new business website, and its coming along really nicely.
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is “how can you build trust on a website?”
People have an inherent distrust of any service they see online, due to the number of the scams out there, and just shoddy companies.
Online is very different than the real world. In the real world when we meet someone we can get a “gut feeling” about them (ever heard that 93% of communication is non-verbal?) based on their body language, tone, rate of speaking etc. We make instant snap judgments whether we know it or not about whether we like and trust someone or something.
But in the online world, we are blind. We have nothing to go on except some words on a page, and human beings weren’t built to trust based on such limited information.
So here are some ideas I came up with to help built trust with prospective customers on yours website:
1. Show that other people trust you
It’s human nature to look and see how other people are acting (and copy it) any time we aren’t sure how to act. This is hard wired into us by nature. You see everyone else in your gang of primitive humans running away from something scary in the woods, well you better start running too. Those who didn’t, never lived long enough to become our ancestors.
So what does this mean online? If you can prove that other people trust you, it will give you instant credibility. Typically people do this with testimonials, but another great way is to let customers write reviews (Amazon is the king of this by the way). In my case, I’m letting customers write reviews of the tutors they used.
2. Piggy Back on Someone Else’s Good Name
The tutors that I’m hiring are all students at top universities. Those universities already have a great reputation, especially in their respective markets, so why not make that painfully obvious (in marketing materials) right up front: THE TUTOR YOU ARE GETTING IS FROM THIS GREAT SCHOOL.
If you are a total unknown just starting off, sometimes you can using others good names (the components that go in your products, the talent who is helping put the product together, someone well known in the field who you can get to endorse your product just by sending them a free copy and a self addressed stamped envelope with their endorsement pre-written for them!) to help launch your product.
One area to be careful of here: don’t infringe on anyones trademark. Originally I was thinking about using a domain name like HarvardUniversityTutors.com. But this would be going too far I think, and could legitimately cause confusion with customers thinking I was affiliated with the university. I’m sure it would be just a matter of time before I heard from Harvard’s lawyers if I used that name!
3. Give Something Away For Free
Finally, no matter what you do some people will just never trust you. So let them try it for free. No not just a money back guarantee. If they have to put in their credit card info you have already lost them. REALLY FREE.
Even if some people cheat the system, and only use the free version (or register a new email address every time) its fine. You have to be ok with that and trust that the majority of people out there are honest. By giving something away for free you will reach a much wider audience.
I’d rather get 50% of a million people to pay (and still help out the other 50% for free) than to get 100% of 10,000 people to pay. If the 50% that cheat and never pay will still tell others about your product and some of them will pay.
The 37 Signals folks agree that giving away something for free is essential. Check out their “Getting Real” book (which is outstanding by the way).
Eben Pagan has talked about this extensively too and he actually suggests you give away your BEST stuff for free. People wonder, “well if I give away my best stuff, what will people pay for?”. The counterintuitive but very important point here is that it is your free stuff (and best stuff) which will win people over and convince them how valuable you or your service are. Without it they would never even take the chance to look at your stuff at all. Convincing them is whats hard. Once they are convinced, they will gladly pay even for only a marginal benefit.
Just help as many people as possible and the rest will sort of take care of itself. Being stingy up front and asking people to fork over their money before you’ve proven yourself worthy, is a sure fire way to turn a bunch of people off.
Conclusion
Those are some thoughts on how to built trust through your website. In the next (and final) preview I’ll show you a google maps implementation I put together and show you the results of some early user testing I did.
The next step will be to start testing it with LIVE real people. I have to keep reminding myself to not make it perfect. Just get it out there and adjust as you go!
Until next time,
Brian Armstrong
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Breaking Free is a collection of articles on tech entrepreneurship, business, and life written by Brian Armstrong. You can read more here »
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Lucky
March 10th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
this is so true. there are so many things in life that you have to give up a portion of the pie to get a piece of a much bigger pie. It is like taking on investors to grow your company. If you dont take on investors, you might keep 100% of the profits but with investors, 50% of the profits might come out to much more.
Dan G
October 1st, 2008 at 10:29 am
Dear Brian,
this is a great service your providing to the community, encouraging others to pursue their entrepeneurial dreams. I have a business idea of my own and would like to ask you for some direction.
My business idea involves a form based website, which his much like your own, which gathers information like First Name, Last Name , email address and a comments field (like this one I am using). I also have to email recipients that post messages, that will email others based on some rules … automatically when the original person leaves a message, keeping everyone in communication with one another.
My questions to you are as follows:
A) what web application(s) did you use for developing your site? What are the pros of using it, what are the cons if you have seen any? Do you think it can handle increased load?
B) do you use a backup/recovery system in case your system goes down?
C) did you buy the hardware and software yourself or did you lease it? I see an advantage to going both ways (ownership vs. lease), the former gets tax writeoffs, the latter does not enjoy tax write offs but gets low cost startup investments. How do you know if your being taken by an ISP if you decide to lease diskspace and hosting services?
D) did you build a relational backend database with this release (if yes what did you use? are you happy with it? Are there any limitations that you see?) if you didn’t build a relational database (why not?)
E) it looks like you developed / programmed your own site, therefore you didn’t have to find someone to trust, to share your idea with through development. I don’t therefore… how do you think I could go about finding a software developer or two? that won’t look at my idea and cannabalize it for themselves seeing potential or informing their friends?
Warm Regards,
Dan
Brian Armstrong
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:21 am
Hi Dan, sure no problem…
A: For this blog I host it on WordPress.org – love it! – and 1and1 hosting
http://www.startbreakingfree.com/go/1and1
But the site mentioned in the article was developed with Ruby on Rails and I’m using SliceHost.com for this since they are better with Ruby On Rails (it’s slightly more expensive).
B: Yes, SliceHost is doing the backups for me.
C: The software was developed in house. The hardware is all managed by SliceHost (outsourced). I think for webhosting it is much better to outsource it than to try and do it yourself. Managing servers is a hassle and it’s so inexpensive now (about $20/month) that the tax savings aren’t a big issue.
D: Yes it’s using MySQL. I’ve used MySQL for every web project I’ve ever done and I love it. Honestly I don’t know why anyone would ever buy a proprietary database when MySQL is open source and free.
E: Yes I programmed it. I wouldn’t be to worried about other developers stealing your idea though. In general, ideas are cheap. It’s executing it and marketing it and making the right decisions that is the hard part. An idea alone is practically worthless. There are probably at least 1000 people who had the basic idea for YouTube and 100 who tried it but didn’t execute it correctly. That being said, if you want you can have developers sign an NDA, but I wouldn’t let this get in the way.
You can try sites like eLance.com and Guru.com to get programming work done. I’ve had mixed results with this though. Some work has been great, some terrible, so you have to research people’s past work carefully and maybe give them smaller projects to work on first.
Hope that helps!
Brian
Lucky
October 4th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
I use 1and1 but am looking to switch because their customer and tech support is so bad that it is not worth their cheaper rates (which are going up this month anyway).
I upgraded to a newer version of wordpress and something at 1and1 was not compatible and it wiped out my entire site. I made a backup but that wasn’t compatible either. I asked 1and1 right away to send me their back up or help me out. They said that they would put in a request and it would be taken care of in an hour or 2. 2 hours later when nothing was done, I called back, emailed and was in touch with a few people at 1and1. They assured me that it will all be taken care of. I called a few times over the next 24 hours to make sure that things were being taken care of and each time they said all they can do is put in a request. After 24 hours I got an email from 1and1 saying that unfortunately since it is after the first 24 hours, there is nothing that they can do for me and next time I should contact them sooner.
It did not help that nobody at 1and1 speaks fluent English.
There is price for everything and sometimes it’s worth spending a bit more for that extra confidence.
Brian Armstrong
October 11th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Gotcha, you are right it may be worth paying more. They are inexpensive but you can get lost in the large numbers there. I’ve seen sites restored from their backups though so at least they work sometimes. Thanks,
Brian