Internet was great. My first large application application combined Hotmail-style functionality with threaded discussion groups and media sharing. I was able to learn bleeding edge web technologies and core Internet protocols. This project was ultimately scaled down as we were unable to figure good product-market fit and decided to focus back on our university studies.
This project enabled me to find employment in the nascent dotcom economy of Finland.
While studying at high school we created our own Lycos-like web directory and portal service called NEXUS. We learned a lot and really recognized Internet as a major transformative force.
I grew up in small town in Southern Finland. My mom worked in childcare and we had a small shop selling recycled building materials. My dad worked in construction and slowly grew his business to dozens of employees. Together with my younger brother we had good childhood and were privileged to gain excellent lifetime friendships.
During my early life Finland was next to Soviet Union while simultaneously being partially western. Slowly things changed in our society and modern Finland was born. Advanced technology became available and we Finns eagerly adopted it. Meteoric rise of Nokia boosted our hopes for the future. Internet arrived and irrevocably changed everything for many of us.
My life was totally hooked to computers since early junior school. VIC20, C64, AMIGA and PC models beyond counting. My coding life started when I was nine. Games and coding were my true passion. While in junior school I authorized some programming tips to the national IT magazine.
Together with my brother we operated fairly advanced multi-node and multi-line BBS from 2400 bbs until the arrival of Internet.
These precious early years were great fun and high adventure for me.
This blog is about me, my startups and my life. So far I have only talked about the UTU startup. I am now starting a new series of posts with the grand name “My Life”. You will learn all too much about my dark & mysterious past, current ambitions and what is happening in my life. Enjoy if you can 😉
Friend asked me why I am doing the UTU project. I have tried analyzing my reasons for UTU and came up with these core reasons.
My experiment with BankRebels concept message failed. The emotional message was not good, conversion rates were poor and I ultimately spent 3+ EUR per each newsletter signup. Most importantly my precious time was taken by this side track and the main project was slowed down.
What is most annoying is that with bit of foresight and thinking all this should have been obvious and avoidable. But somehow it was not and BR track went onwards. I was just stupid on this. The BR track is now halted and the main UTU track is again moving onwards.
Was it all just a loss? Not fully. I gained 100+ signups whom I can contact later when we launch. Facebook ads now feel much more familiar to me. Main benefit might have been the recognizition that cost-effective FB advertising is not easy at all and there is tons of “weird unexplainable stuff” going on.
The project developing our new platform and service is now codenamed as UTU. This is just a placeholder name until the concrete domain and company name are decided.
We are originating from Finland. In our native language UTU means haze, mist, fog and cloud.
Many of my former projects and products have taken names from Maori language. In Maori language UTU means quite many things and has somewhat mixed emotional tone. Some of the meanings are negative, but majority of the meanings are in my opinion positive. Main positive meanings are payment, reply, reciprocity, maintenance of balance & harmony, gift exchange, kind deeds and response.
I think this internal code name is quite suitable 🙂
It’s now time to share this blog with the world. We are not yet ready to launch our service, but progress is being made every day. My belief is that we are creating something unique and great.
First version of the bankrebels.com landing page is now published. It might not be ultimately great yet, but I can iteratively improve on this as more data and ideas become available.
Now is the time to get some visitors to the landing page, so I can evaluate various psychological messages on different countries and learn more about Facebook advertising and related cost-optimization.
I created small Facebook ad campaigns for this purpose. These campaigs are initially targeted to English-speaking people living in Greece, Portugal and Spain. My hunch is that people in those countries might be more receptive to this message as financial crisis is hitting them the hardest.
Depending on the campaign the click-through-rate seems to vary between 0.020% and 0.050%. This is not too bad, but is not very good either. Average cost per click is 0.14 EUR.
The conversion rate in the landing page itself seems to be about 4%. I think this will improve if we make actual graphic design effort. Might not bother to do this at all.
Interestingly, over 80 % of people who have given their email are coming from Greece. This could be an artefact of my facebook bid policy limiting visibility mostly to low-cost clicks.
As mentioned previously my true goal is not against banks at all. I truly believe our new way will ultimately benefit everyone, banks included. Thus this domain name is likely not perfect for my long term purposes. But for now want to check out various psychological messages on different countries. This is interesting stuff in itself, creates a nucleus of future mailing list for our service launch and most importantly allows me to study how Facebook advertising can be optimized and cost-optimized.
Decided to host this landing page with KickOfflabs.com service. They have good tools for landing page creation, metrics and social integration followup.
First public version of the landing page is now complete. It’s pretty rudimentary as I do not yet have graphic designer on board, and had to create this page with my limited design skills. Might not even do improved version as my preferred graphic designer Juha is going to two week summer holiday soon.
Am going to try out various messages and variants and analyze the conversion results.
Hopefully this will generate some interest. User gets thankyou popup and also an email pointing to this blog.
I tried creating a merchandising store via CafePress, but it proved to be an epic failure so I soon halted the store entirely. It might still be visible at http://www.cafepress.co.uk/bankrebels if you want to see how it was constructed.