A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Being the author of a book gives you huge credibility.

Jason Cohen: Even now when everyone knows you can publish, it does. We were doing enterprise sales where credibility is even more important. I remember being with a potential customer in San Diego. Our champion inside the company threw one of our books on the table. He points to it and goes, “We’re with these guys.” That wasn’t even us telling. He was our champion. There’s something different about a tactile physical thing that you can point at.

Sramana Mitra: I agree. We’ve used this very extensively actually.

Jason Cohen: Here’s another thing that’s not obvious. To get the book, we have to ship it to you which we’re happy to do for free. That means we have to ask you for information but people are happy to do that because they get something. Unlike all the usual lead forms, here it’s, “Of course, they’re asking me all this. They’re shipping me something.” All of a sudden, we have incredible detailed data about all of our leads that you almost never get.

Because it’s physical and because you’re paying a little more money to ship it out, you gain lead quality and lead data which is fantastic. We put in a field which says, “How did you hear about us?” It turns out people skip it or lie about it. Here’s how I know that. Originally, our how-did-you-hear was a drop-down list. People would pick things. I put two things in there that sounded good but we didn’t do. You saw us in this magazine, except we’re not in that magazine. I put two boogers in there that weren’t true. Those boogers were picked just as much as the other ones. They’re not really picking. They’re just going through the form. That didn’t work.

Then we turn to a fill-in-the-blank. There was no validation. You can even leave it blank. People filled it out 92% of the time and we were able to map those to real things. We actually got real data about how they heard about us. Because we were sending them something real, they would fill it out and not just skip it. We got this data.

Here’s where the final dot gets connected. We would advertise in a magazine. I could tell you the day that Dr. Dobb’s hit people’s desk because I could see an uptick in book requests that said Dr. Dobb’s. There’s not any other system I’ve heard of in which you can measure your success in magazine ads. In short, you can measure anything. That gave us the ability to try all sorts of things. We could try all kinds of things that are traditionally difficult to measure with the same precision that you can from digital advertising.

The magazine would say, “We’re raising our rates. Your full-page ad is now going to be $5,000.” Then we’d say, “Let me show you the data.” Then we’d show how they’re one of the worst performing ads there is and so if they raise our rates, we’re going to quit. We’d say, “I can show you the data. In fact, I need you to charge me less. I don’t need you to be the most effective advertising channel.” The physical book earns you stuff whether it’s attention or lead forms. The kids of campaign you can do and how you manage them becomes completely different when you have good data. Those are all unexpected benefits of doing this. You could see that there is a wealth of value that happened because we did that.

This segment is part 5 in the series : A Serial Entrepreneur’s Awesome Journey from Austin, Texas: Jason Cohen, CTO of WP Engine
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