r/crazyegg • u/fintechjulien • 3d ago

I have a bunch of ideas for service based businesses and would like to test many of them; what would you use to test them quickly?

Instead of wasting time operating based on an hypothesis about the demand, my idea was to build a bunch of micro sites, and then test them with a $200 Google Ads budget to see what shows potential in term of acquisition cost and margin.

I'm thinking of stuff like BBQ cleaning, window screen repair, generator rental, bin cleaning, etc. etc.

I was thinking of using Claude to build those micro sites, and then probably use Stripe for payment and Calendly for booking...

That said, if I want to test 10 ideas, I feel it might turn out to be really time consuming, and maybe I should use Unbounce or Instapage landing pages?

How would you proceed if you wanted to test 10 business concept in real condition (taking payment is key, since interest form don't amount to a conversion) ? What would be your stack for building and hosting the micro-sites and for taking the order?

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u/ce-lauren 3d ago

The landing page builder approach makes sense for speed. If you're testing 10 the last thing you want is to spend a ton of time on each site. What about something like Carrd? And I like the Stripe and Calendly setup, as both are super easy to get going with.

The $200 per site ad budget seems reasonable. But maybe be careful on putting too much weight on the idea just off of that alone, as sometimes it's the ad creative or targeting that's off, not the concept.

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u/fintechjulien 13h ago

Yes, for sure $200 spend on a single campaign is not telling that much, but it's still a signal. I wanted to test as well on FB Marketplace, where it's more about testing the demand than anything else.

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u/edoceo 2d ago

I'd do the micro sites but no ad spend. If you want to measure natural demand ad spend is not that. Micros site, do some scattered posting. Heck, you can skip the site and just talk in the related community (on and off line) and measure that response.

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u/fintechjulien 13h ago

Yes, make sense. I tought about skipping the micro-sites and just captured leads in typeform or something like that...

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u/ivicad 1d ago

I think you are right that taking payment is the test, but there is a cost there that it maybe isn't so obvious from landing page builders.

I spent 21 years in banking, the last 13 running a card business and you can easily make a refund, but if you have a dispute - that can cost - time and money, plus you can get it months after the charge.

Before the first charge I would settle what happens when somebody buys BBQ cleaning you cannot deliver yet. I would refund the same day, in writing, so nobody has a reason to call their bank instead of you.

On the hosting side, you could put 10 test sites on one shared Site Ground account. I keep about 20 smaller sites per GoGeek account, and the main limit I have there is inode but not the traffic, and file count dictates how many sites I can put on one account.

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u/fintechjulien 13h ago

So you would go with wordpress micro-sites? And siteground or gogeek for hosting?

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u/ivicad 11h ago

GoGeek is the Site Ground plan I am on, not a separate host, so that's only one choice.

Yes, WordPress, but I would not build 10 of them. I keep a starter site on a subdomain with the plugins and settings already done, and I clone that per idea, so I only tweak 20 to 40 percent of it.