Month: February 2018

March 2018 – Make Money in March

Copy of monthly email sent to customers for March 2018
Howdy,

Wait, it’s not March yet – why the March update?

We were too excited not to share! We are ahead of schedule and are going to save you / make you money (so read on friend)!

Thank you all for participating in Piglet Beta #3 and providing feedback. Just this month I’ve refunded a total of ~$1200 for those who completed the monthly survey (please fill it out).

March Update: Make Money in March

Feburary was a busy month. My son was born (Atlas), we broke one hundred paying customers, I closed 42 “issues” – 13 bugs & 29 features – which customers identified and somehow development is still on track!

My personal goal is to hit one thousand customers by end-of-year. With that in mind, please share ProjectPiglet.com with friends and colleagues. Currently, we only have enough funds through July 2018 (so we need more people!).

Ways to Make Money & Save

Make Money with Referrals – If you’re interested in participating in our referral program, please email me. At the moment, we are only accepting people who can net at least 10 referrals (i.e. have a distribution channel). We are offering 25% of all profit from those referred. Next month, we’ll open up the general referral program: one month free for both referrer and new user at registration.

Save Money with New Plans – We released a new “Beta #3” plan (it’s 80% off)! You can change your current plan to that plan – go to Account -> Subscriptions, then select the plan.

Email-Only Service – Next month I will be seperating out an email-only service, where you can create curated email notifications for yourself. They will be similar to those you receive from followed topics of ProjectPiglet.com. It will be priced at $10 per month. This service is already and will continue to be available on ProjectPiglet.com.

Exciting Updates

ProjectPiglet.com:

  • Improved mobile support site wide (including charts)
  • Assets (Crypto & Stocks)
    • Added sorting by Trade Potential
    • Added filtering by market cap
    • Added “Related Sector [companies]” to stocks
    • Added Trade Potential to index page
    • Added 1 day, 5/7 day, and month changes in price
    • Increased data density for quicker reviewing
    • Improved “Top Related Stories” for asset(s)
    • Real prices and volumes shown on asset charts (denormalized)
    • Added loading icon when switching timeframes (asset charts)
    • Improved trend notifications tracking “Company” or “Currency”
  • Trends / Notifications
    • When clicking “Get Notified” or “Follow” the type is not tracked
      • Types: Company, Currency, Phrase
      • Enables Trade Potential notifications [March 1st]
      • Must unfollow and refollow companies / currencies
    • (Email) Added links to subjects (to ProjectPiglet.com)
    • (Email) Notifications of Trade Potential [will be out March 1st]
  • Landing page
    • Added rotating words describing what Piglet tracks
    • Added “How it works”
    • Added sale bar (how many beta spots are still open)
    • Revamped the demo section (simple & easy)
  • Subscriptions
    • Added ~2 new users per day since Beta #3 launch (late January)
    • Refunded $1190 to those who provided survey feedback
    • Added new (80% off plans) for the first 250 users on the Beta
      • Coupons still apply
      • One month free for feedback still applies
      • [Coming soon] Referrals will apply

Piglet Blog (posts below):

Upcoming (Next 30 Days)

  • General Referral program
    • One month free for both referrer and new user at registration
  • Emails
    • Show prior opinion when sending email on opinion change(s)
  • Assets (Crypto & Stocks)
    • Hourly tracking for fourtune 500 + top 100 cryptocurrencies
    • Minutely tracking for fourtune 500 + top 100 cryptocurrencies
    • Add Promoter Score to “Assets Chart”
  • Lettergram.net:
    • Going to host new Email-Only service for curated emails
    • All users will have basic access to ProjectPiglet.com (no assets)
    • All servicing should be one through Lettergram.net
  • Implement survey feedback / fix bugs

If you have any questions or concerns, please add to survey and / or reach out.

Happy Investing!

— Austin, Piglet Team

Increasing Data Density

One thing that is clear across the web, is that people really like data density. If you look at Reddit, you’ll see it’s as packed as can be with information. From the comment title to the image tag, the comment count, the votes, posted time, etc.

The goal is to make web browsing easy and information plentiful. There are better examples of course, Google search results, or my personal favorite Hacker News. Mobile applications such as Instagram and Snapchat, include this density as well. Trying to fill out each display with the maximum image possible.

The trick to this, is ensuring there is:

  • Enough space to clearly read the information
  • Information should be regularly updated

Having infromation that regularly updates being the only reason to keep it dense – so people can come back and scan the information quickly and make descisions.

Denser Crypto and Stock Information

As some users mentioned during our monthly survey; the density of information on the assets page was rather sparse. Improve this, we’re going to take two releases, but the most recent release has literally doubled the density:

As you can see, the space between assets is limited. The only disadvantage here is the fact there’s a bunch of white space.

The next release in / near April will see the addition of charts and / or stories (depending how best the space can be utilized). This will likely look similar to the breaking news section on the homepage:

So stay tuned for more!

New Beta Landing Page

A mere four days ago I released the new “Plan” – a cheaper version of Piglet, specifically targeting only emails. Upon further consideration, I’ve decided to remove them from the home page (you can still change the plan via the subscriptions setting). The reasoning behind this is simple – I realized I wasn’t being laser focused on the single product: the financial system.

Why the change?

I realize this was a quick change – you may be asking, what prompted it? The answer is simple and twofold…

First, a user on Reddit suggested I was doing to much on a single landing page. It may sound odd, I’m listening to some random persons advice, but the fact is they’re right ProjectPiglet.com‘s landing page was trying to do too much. I have done a lot of research, built more landing pages than I can count, even give advice to others. Apparently, I needed a stranger pointing it out for me to fix it this time.

The second, and perhaps more important reason was pointed out by Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on HN) in his blog post: Business of SaaS. ProjectPiglet.com‘s price point is likely too high ($50 / month) for low touch, non-enterprise sales. A more reasonable price would be $5 / month to $20 / month. I feel proud I’ve gotten an average of 2.2 signups per day at $50 / month (for a consumer product, with sub-par landing page), but I feel limiting scope initially can have it’s benefits.

Structure Going Forward

Reverting back to a single plan (for the moment).

The price of ProjectPiglet.com during beta is now going to be the following (for monthly pricing):

  • 80% off for the first 250 users ($10/month)
  • 60% off for users 250 – 500 ($20/month)
  • 40% off for users 500 – 750 ($30/month)
  • 20% off for users 750 – 1000 ($40/month)
  • Full price after

This may change, but for the moment this should help me get more users registering. Further, the following will still be in effect:

  • Refund monthly payment after feedback
  • Coupon codes (25% off – pigletblog2018)
  • Our referral program launches in March

With all of this, I hope we can up to an average of 5 – 10+ registrations a day.

At the end of the beta, it is likely all users will be migrated to the full plan. Current users on the old $50 / month plan will receive an email asking if they wish to be migrated to the cheaper plan (in March) for the duration of the beta.

Separating Out Services

As mentioned in a previous blog post, some services are going to be placed into a separate brand. While still accessible from the main ProjectPiglet.com site, there will be a separate site, which hopefully will attract different users. ProjectPiglet.com will be a consumer site, focusing on investing.

New Look

With all of that said, we have updated the landing page:

New Plans, New Landing Page

From day one there have been plans for ProjectPiglet.com to support many different use cases. At the core, it’s an analytics platform centered around people. On top of the platform you can search news, follow sentiment on politicians, get investing advice and more. With that in mind, from the start of the website development (early-2017) we laid out plans to eventually support three different paid plans, plus a free plan.

Today, we’re excited to announce the “Basic” and “Premium” plan split!

(The next two plans are “Enterprise (API access)” and “Free Search”, set for release later this year)

Basic Plan

The Basic plan on ProjectPiglet.com is called “Discover” in our system, and comes with the following features:

  • Search any topic
  • Follow any topic
  • View:
    • Experts’ Opinions
    • Promoter Score
    • Trend
    • Top Related Stories
  • Receive email notifications on followed topics

For those who’ve been with ProjectPiglet.com for Beta #1 and Beta #2, the Basic plan is essentially those features. There is no access to “Assets”, including the stock tracker, the cryptocurrency tracker, and importantly the “Trade Potential” engine. However, it does provide news updates (and example below):

Why the change?

It turns out, half of the users who fill out the ProjectPiglet.com survey, list the news emails as their favorite feature. Most of whom, never actually use the “Asset system”. Further, our open rates and click rates on emails are pretty astounding:

  • 42% Average open rate
  • 11% Average click rate

One item I should note, is that only 50% of users currently have this setup (46 of 106), the same percentage of users claiming it’s their favorite feature.

Basic Plan Price Justification

The average user also state they are willing to pay between $5 to $15 per month (a few users stating $0 / month and a few much higher) for said service.

With the survey results in mind, the new Basic plan is going to be priced at:

  • $15 / month (for monthly change)
  • $10 / month (for yearly charge)

Given this reduces the cost for people interested in everything besides Assets, I hope this converts more visitors, but also makes the current customers happy.

Finally, this will enable an entire separate service, which I’ve already tested at Lettergram.net (years ago). Daily emails of topics that interests you. However, with Piglet, we can literally have an entirely custom mailing list!

Premium Plan

The Basic plan on ProjectPiglet.com is called “Expert Insights” in our system, and comes with the following features (in addition to Basic):

  • Search any Cryptocurrency
  • Follow any Cryptocurrency
  • Search anyPublicly Traded Company
  • Follow any Publicly Traded Company
  • View (Assets):
    • Trade Potential
    • Price vs Experts’ Opinion
    • Trade Volume vs Discussion
    • Daily changes in:
      • Experts’ Opinion
      • Promoter Score
    • Trend (Volume of Discussion)

There are also a few features coming in the next several weeks:

  • Trade Potential Email Notifications
  • Search by Trade Potential
  • “Build a Portfolio”, track assets over time

From here on out, new features will primarily be built out for Premium users.

Premium Plan Price Justification

That is part of the reason the Premium plan is going to be priced at:

  • $50 / month (for monthly change)
  • $25 / month (for yearly charge)

You might think this is steep, however it is inline with similar systems such as Investors Business Daily:

Investors Business Daily provides a similar service, without the tracking of Experts / Insiders, the masses, etc. which ProjectPiglet.com provides. Further, there are several people in the surveys claiming they’d be willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month, others as little as $10. Given that dichotomy and where we are trying to take this, we feel the pricing is fair.

Finally, we are currently getting a 1.6% conversion rate (not bad for product price), which we feel can be improved via improving the landing page (43 new users with 2,600 new users visiting the site, this month).

New Landing Page

Finally, I think it’s important to note that this change also comes with a much needed refresh of the landing page.

First, the new registration box:

As you can see, it comes with two different billing types (Monthly and Annual) and the two different plans. Users already registered can simply go to their subscriptions tab in the top right of after they login. You can switch your subscription at any time, even keeping the coupon (which is autofilled if you have one applied):

In addition to the new registration box, I’ve also gone ahead and added three separate kinds of demos:

Each one of those buttons trigger a different kind of demo. Clicking the Invest Money button, brings the investment view:

Search News button brings a view you’d see when searching ProjectPiglet.com and it is similar to what you’d see in an email:

Finally, if you click the Follow Politics button, you can see the classic “Experts’ Opinion” chart, which has been on ProjectPiglet.com throughout it’s existence:

All of which are specific use cases for ProjectPiglet.com, and should help specifically highlight what given users are interested in. My only personal reservation, is that I should show all three at the same time (as all the features appear in the standard dashboard).

Closing Remarks

I think it’s important to note here, there is a high likelihood the Basic plan will continue to be supported by ProjectPiglet.com, but also be split into a separate brand via Lettergram.net. Project Piglet was always supposed to be a place holder and will likely be moved to a new name after the development of the various systems are complete. “InsiderOpinion” likely replacing ProjectPiglet.com, later this year.

Regarding the other plans mentioned at the top. The next plan to be released will likely be the “Free Plan”, which isn’t so much a plan as a website that’ll let you search. The largest issue I’ve faced developing Project Piglet is that there is a high entrance fee, thus lower conversion rate. I’ve tried to reduce this with tons of coupons, 30 days off, provide refunds for feedback, etc.

Even just today, I was receiving flack for sharing the service[1]:

The fact is, building trust is hard. That’s why we release analyses, are writing this blog, and perhaps a free service would help people try the product prior to giving us a hard time.

The only thing holding back the our development of free search is really funds. Hence, we released the Basic and Premium plans. Assuming we can get somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 paying users (at 106 today), then we should have it completely covered. Which would let us further improve our branding and user registration.

Anyway, hope you’ve enjoyed the update! Stay tuned for more!

CryptoCurrency Analysis #2

Earlier this week I released CryptoCurrency Analysis #1 (02/14/2018), during which I sold all my Litecoin (LTC). Considering I hate being out of the market – this morning I was deciding where to enter.

Bitcoin (BTC) – 02/17/2018

Today (compared to 02/14/2018), Bitcoin is a bit on the up trend. Overall, I believe it’s a wise decision to hold the coin for the time being. However, I’d be very hesitant to buy it at the moment, with ProjectPiglet.com recommending a hold pattern:

With that in mind, I’ll not be tossing any of my money that way.

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) – 02/17/2018

Bitcoin Cash on the other hand has moved to a strong buy position (according to ProjectPiglet.com):

Personally, I feel it’s an alright time to buy Bitcoin Cash, as it is on the uptrend and  ProjectPiglet.com is recommending. On the other hand, I think there is another better opportunity out there which potentially has more upside. Particularly, because there appears to be more development…

Litecoin (LTC) – 02/17/2018

Today, Litecoin is recommended as a sell / hold. It’s shot up a lot, but the Experts’ Opinion on ProjectPiglet.com has not followed. In a sense, this means the price has likely outpaced its perceived value:

ProjectPiglet.com has recommended a sell for the last several days, which had you been following the trend would have made significant gains. In fact, we sold right around $210, so we missed some of the gains, but had bought much lower (so we were up ~30%).

Ethereum (ETH) – 02/17/2018

Today, we are putting our money into  Ethereum. For better or worse, we view it as the current best opportunity over the next few days / week.

Part of the reason we favor Ethereum over Bitcoin Cash is, is there is simply more discussion and particularly more positive promotional score:

Ethereum is consistently more positive and thus we believe it’ll have a higher chance of being stable.

Overall Holdings – 02/17/2018

Today, I’m sitting at roughly 54% into Ethereum. While still holding the Bitcoin Cash I’ve had for some time, and a little bit of Bitcoin:

From here, we’ll see how long I hold these assets and when I’ll either switch to cash or move to another currency.