AJ Davis  00:00

Hey everybody, it's AJ, I can't wait for you to listen to today's episode of the experiment zone podcast. We're going to be talking with Brian Thomas from completing the puzzle, which is a really fun company that helps families unwind with more puzzle time and we'll be taking a look at their site together to identify some ways they can improve their conversion rates.

 Let's dive in. Hey, Brian, thanks for being on today's episode. How are you today?

Brian Thomas 00:32

Doing good? Thanks for having me

 AJ Davis  00:34

Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you guys are doing.

 Brian Thomas 00:38

Brian Thomas, I'm the co-founder of Completing The Puzzle. We're a puzzle rental subscription service. We're similar to old school Netflix, if you might not be old enough to remember, but people used to sign up for Netflix, get DVDs sent to them, watch them and send them back. We do the same thing for jigsaw puzzles.

AJ Davis  00:56

Yeah, when you first told me about this, I fell in love with the whole idea of it. Why did you decide to do this? Why is this what you're, you're doing in the world?

Brian Thomas 01:06

I, technically, didn't decide to do it. My wife came up with the idea. It was a covid business. So it started March 2020. It was my wife's birthday. Her birthday is actually the end of March. So lockdown just hit everyone. No one knew what to do, and our trip to Park City got canceled. So instead of going to Park City, I got her a puzzle of Park City, and I gave it to her, and she's like, Oh, this is such a sweet puzzle. We're going to do it once. Put it on the shelf. Someone should rent these. Did a quick Google search. Didn't look like anyone was really doing it, so I launched it the following weekend, in about six hours, and here we are.

AJ Davis  01:45

And how's it been? How has it been received? The idea of, instead of purchasing a puzzle, renting it,

Brian Thomas 01:51

it has these challenges, because there wasn't a specific market for this. It was kind of like creating a new segment, and it's not so far off because there's Rent the Runway, there's Netflix DVD, like I just talked about. So people are kind of understanding the concept of renting, so it's just applying it to puzzles, and they're the main challenges are with shipping. I think shipping is very difficult to ship evenly from our warehouses in Austin, so it's very hard to ship the same to someone that's in Dallas as the same Maine or Baltimore, even Seattle. So people do have a little bit of a different experience, and we've done different things to try to mitigate that, but it still happens.

AJ Davis  02:36

Before we started recording today, you showed me a little trophy that you guys have put together. Can you show our viewers and tell us a little bit about the program you're

Brian Thomas 02:44

launching? Yeah, for sure. So we, when we started the business, we hand write notes to every single person, and when I say we it's my handwriting that looks like I'm a three year old child. My wife, Elena, she hand wrote every note, and it kind of started this really organic conversation between us and our customers, and they would send notes back, and we just became, like, kind of invested in their lives, in a sense, especially during covid, I would get on the phone and chat with everyone, and part of the we try to give back. So every year, we try to do something special for our members, and this year we're doing it for all of our members. That has done 100 puzzles, we're sending them this acrylic Award and a few other little swaggy things. What's really wild is, since I ordered them, I ordered too little, so had to go back and order more problems. Yeah, and on that right next to the award is actually, this was a president or present from one of our customers. It's a cute little bear. Yeah, it's fun.

AJ Davis  03:52

I love how close you are to your customers, that you're like, very authentically, reaching out to them, finding ways to connect with them. What has surprised you about the customers that work with you?

Brian Thomas 04:07

Everyone's pretty forgiving. We're pretty open about it being a small, family run business. And we'll, we'll tell people, hey, you know, if there's an issue at the end of the day, it is just a puzzle. And I say that both out of pride and just like in the reality of it, so if someone gets someone mad, we'll send them another puzzle. If someone wants a different puzzle, we'll try to make it up to them. And we really go out of our way to just make it fun. Because we started the business during covid to make puzzling more fun for people, and that's our goal, is to just keep making it fun. So

AJ Davis  04:40

Tell us a little bit about how your business works. So you have a website, people sign up for a subscription. How does that all come together? How did you guys approach it? What are you doing now to make sure people can sign up with you

Brian Thomas 04:53

Sure? Previously, I ran a digital agency. We did marketing and. Technology for subscription businesses on Shopify. So the transition to not having the businesses starting the business was kind of easy, because I understood the challenges that subscription businesses had, and especially on Shopify. At the time, subscriptions weren't native to Shopify, and now that they kind of our but it's still a crazy ecosystem out there. So our website is Webflow. So when you go to the website, it's a Webflow page, it's a page builder. And I really like using a page builder. It gives us the opportunity to change copy, split test copy, and try to figure out what messaging really resonates and also properly reflects the brand and the mission and everything that we're after. And

AJ Davis  05:45

I noticed you said the word split test. So tell me a little bit about how you guys approach experimentation and try new things out. In

Brian Thomas 05:53

The beginning, we just we wanted to see what would resonate with people, so we just threw a bunch of words out there, and we had two or three variations of and when I say a bunch of words, so specifically the headline and the sub headline, when anyone goes to website, first thing they see is colors in the image, and then they'll read the headline, and if they enjoy the headline, then they'll keep reading the sub headline, and then keep going down the page. So we did a lot of testing around, what was that headline that was really going to grab people's attention and say, Hey, I need puzzle rentals in my life, so

AJ Davis  06:29

and so some of our audience, maybe other owners or store owners who are trying to figure out what they should be doing. Why did you decide to test the headline and what did it get for your business? How did it help you?

Brian Thomas 06:41

You can approach it multiple ways. You can say which one's going to convert the best. So you can throw a headline up there that says, lose 100 pounds in two days guaranteed, and everyone's going to click and everyone's going to go through. And then you can also say something that won't resonate with your customers. So it's everything in between. And for us, it was What's something that's going to engage the customers, but also not, not mislead them. I think a lot of times, people can get down a rabbit hole and say, what's going to convert the highest and what's going to bring in the highest dollar value for my time, I try to balance it with, hey, what's resonating with people, aka bringing in more money, but also going to keep people around for a long period of time.

AJ Davis  07:25

Yeah, I love that carefulness, because I think it's easy to just go after the sale today, but it's more important to get the whole positive experience for customers so they not only come back themselves, but also maybe share what you're doing with other people who would like it absolutely

Brian Thomas 07:42

and again, like we created this to be fun, and wasn't necessarily just, I mean, it's a business, but it wasn't, wasn't like, hey, let's how much money we got to people

AJ Davis  07:54

I'd love to transition into a screen share. So are most people coming to your website on desktop, mobile? Kind of a mixed mobile. Okay, well, we'll do that. We'll take a look at mobile today. Then. Okay, great. So I've got your mobile site pulled up. What I like to do in this section is to kind of think aloud, as though this was the first time I was seeing it. Kind of ask some questions you're you've already done some testing. So if there's anything you want to share about decisions you've made or questions you're thinking about. We'd love to hear that too, but I want to make sure that you know the things that we've talked about, about what makes you special that really resonates here as well. So you know, when I pulled this up on mobile, I immediately got the pop up. I think it was probably delayed a little bit to acknowledge me as a puzzle lover, with the option for 20% off based on getting my email address. I think this is a nice clean overlay. It's got all the UX functions like the x to get out of it quickly and start puzzling here, have you? You know, one of the things you might consider is swapping it around so that the offer is first, or that the text is a little simpler here, to just make it in and out. This is clearly what I'm doing. Have you guys done any testing or anything you want to share about the email sign up approach you're taking?

Brian Thomas 09:11

That's one thing I have not tested. We just threw it out there. No. I mean, that's a great point. We should take a look at maybe split testing something. And yeah, we kind of threw that together last minute.

AJ Davis  09:23

Yeah. And I think one of the things I love to share, because I came from the product world, and when I came into marketing and I saw all these email pop ups, I thought, what a what a disruptive experience. But what we actually see in reality is people are so used to this, right? We're so used to being prompted with something, and if it's value driven, like this 20% offer, a lot of people will sign up for it and then remember, kind of stick around to go through it. So I like that you all have this offer here. You mentioned copy testing, so what you've landed with is unwind with more puzzle time. I like the balance that's even more focused on the quality. Qualitative experience, the Unwind piece of it, not just we. You can rent puzzles from us. Get access to all the puzzles. Get started. You've got your nice get started. CTA echoed in both places. I notice here you have this text here. Maybe this is functioning as some social proof. So tell us a little bit about the 500,000 puzzles shipped

Brian Thomas 10:27

correct. So that's actually interesting to what I was talking about before, about being authentic and then being accurate. Originally, we had something that said X number of customers signed up last week. But because Webflow is not dynamic, we had to go in and edit every day. And this one customer was like, hey, the same number of people signed up every week for the last three weeks. What's going on? I was like, yeah, it's true, but it's not. I didn't mean for it to be misleading, so we actually changed it to the number of puzzles that we've shipped correct and that is social proof. I like having some sort of element of social proof on the hero image. So again, as soon as someone lands on the page, headline, sub headline, and if you can squeeze in some social proof, I think it's a win,

AJ Davis  11:15

yeah. And the other thing I see that you're doing well here is there's you can kind of peek at the next part of the page peeking through. So sometimes I'll look at a site and you'll just have a really big hero section, and then you'll look at the heat map data, and people aren't scrolling on the page at all. So I'm guessing, or inferring from your design that you are getting more people scrolling than on average, with that peeking out there Was that intentional?

Brian Thomas 11:42

It's intentional. Yeah,

AJ Davis  11:46

let's see more time less screen time. I'm always curious how people come up with these, these qualitative pieces, and I'm curious if you speak to it, because I see you're talking about we have less screen time. Are these things that you desired for people to have, or that people tell you, is the impact? You know? How do you come to some of this copy that's here?

Brian Thomas 12:08

Yeah, that's that for us, was kind of old school. It's kind of interesting. We can take reviews online, you can call people, you can talk to people. One of the things that's crazy with ours, going back to the handwritten part, is we actually have, like, this is one that I got today. So we have all these handwritten notes. And then some customers go so far as to, like, actually send us, like, letters. And it's, it's so incredibly sweet. So people spend a lot of time talking back and forth to us, and we, at one point, did a lot of two way communication. And I even have, like, a whole box full of like, countless notes. So I actually went through this entire box. I'll show you. It's not, not small.

AJ Davis  12:57

Wow, that was a lot of letters. Yeah,

Brian Thomas 13:00

Yes, and what's actually really interesting is you can't just go through and say all the customers that love us, because not everyone's going to love you, and they honestly probably shouldn't. And this is actually one of the funniest: this was the letter of hate. So someone just sent a block of wood. So it's kind of taking not only the good things but the bad things, and coming through and saying, if someone didn't like something about it, what didn't they like? Why didn't they like it? And trying to find peace together with what people did like, going through, summarizing everything and pulling out all the interesting nuggets. So that's actually how we got to a lot of this, it was pretty manual, but I feel like it's pretty authentic to where we want to go, too.

AJ Davis  13:46

Yeah, it's really authentic, but it's still a qualitative, qualitative, data driven approach. It sounds like we're really, like, collecting a lot of information from real people to figure out the ways they talk about the impact good and bad of what you've done and what your business is doing, rather than, you know, using AI to generate something you're saying, like, what do real people say about us? And I've always found in testing that the things that are coming from customers or the closest to customers, like the words themselves, tend to perform the best, because it's not how we've internalized, how we want people to think about us, but instead how people describe our business, or describe the impact of our business.

Brian Thomas 14:29

Absolutely, I think AI has its place, and I don't think it's coming up with headlines. I think I think you can use it. I think of it as my marketing buddy, where, if I'm kind of stuck on something and my writing tends to be a little too verbose, I'll get chat gpt to kind of condense it down, and then I'll rewrite it again. It's just it's doing the copy work. So figuring out what you think is going to work, writing it down, rewriting it down. And then rewriting it down so that it makes sense. Yeah, chat gpt is just gonna spit out stuff. Yeah, it's

AJ Davis  15:05

almost like a peer reviewer. It's like, what do you think of this? Or like, tell me what this means to you. I have personally found that chatgpt is great for helping me set to reflect back the tone of my message. You know, what is the tone of this? Does this seem energetic? Does this seem critical? What does it look like? And I think the same could be done for copy. Like, is this tone consistent? Maybe a useful prompt for chatgpt, definitely. Yeah, I want to keep scrolling through here. I really love that you have sectioned off, where almost every section I'm scrolling through has a call to action. This one's a little bit longer, but there's a Get Started button within each of the sections. That's probably a balancing act. There may be some opportunities to add a little bit more there, but I think you've got a good start to making sure that's all in there. You've got the what you get section, lots of questions in here, and I love the consistent use of get started throughout here. So I'm now looking at the Get Started flow. It says step one of three, and I can choose my level based on beginner, intermediate or expert. It's got some nice guidance here about what that means for the size of the puzzle, how much time it takes. New to puzzles. Want to challenge experts only. I like the little nudge there. They really want to test their skills, experts only. And then you've got some categories here. How did you guys decide on which categories you would use?

Brian Thomas 16:40

Elena and I sat down and just went through what we tried to do because puzzle websites exist. So we're like, what are all these different websites doing? Some had 30 different categories, and others had much less. So it was a balancing act, and I don't think you're ever going to get it right. We just took a stab and kind of stuck with it

AJ Davis  17:02

Nice and a holiday in the first position here. Is this a frequently picked choice? Do people tend to pick things around, like seasonal things or holidays?

Brian Thomas 17:13

So this is actually them selecting ones they don't like.

AJ Davis  17:16

Oh, they don't like it. Well, that's a good catch for me to think this was what you do

Brian Thomas 17:21

Yes. So that's interesting. That's something we've split tested a lot and gone back and forth on the we're making a lot of changes throughout the website, and we have a lot coming down the pipeline very soon, the next month or so, and a lot of did, a lot of it is from lessons learned here.

AJ Davis  17:41

Yeah, so hey, I'm, as I said, I'm going through like a first, first time user, so I think maybe something to assist with the do not like. I think I'm picturing almost like the do not, do not cross like this, the O with the dash through it, some sort of icon there to just reinforce like, don't like these puzzles, or maybe you don't like in red or something to just draw it out. So good to know. So if I didn't like holiday puzzles, I would select here, and then it checks a little here. And almost maybe a way to reinforce it again here is to like to cross through it, like I don't like this one, so put a big X through it, and then I can go to next, and then choose your plan, unlimited puzzles with any plan. So I'm seeing the cost per month based on if I pay per month. It looks like you sign up for three months or six months at a time, free shipping and returns. I like the repetition of that, because it did definitely cross my mind. So I think the unlimited puzzles with any plan is a piece of information I hadn't noticed before. And feels like, wow, I'm getting a lot for this subscription. So I would want to have seen that a little bit earlier in the process to know that I'm going to sign up and pick a plan, but that I can get as many puzzles as I want, and maybe some information about how that works. Now, we did move pretty fast on the homepage, so it may have been in there, but that specific information is really resonating with me here, and maybe could be pulled out in the hero or somewhere bolder in the homepage.

Brian Thomas 19:15

Correct? No, I agree that word is actually the bane of our marketing.

AJ Davis  19:20

Which one is unlimited? Unlimited tell us about that.

Brian Thomas 19:23

I think people have different connotations of what Unlimited is. We used to when we started, we threw it everywhere. And then, in reality, as I mentioned, shipping is the hardest thing in this business, and everyone has a different expectation of what unlimited based on Amazon, spoiling everybody with two day shipping. So unlimited got pushed down a little bit

AJ Davis  19:47

I see. So tell us a little bit about it, though. So when you say unlimited on that last page, I'll pull it back up. What? What can that experience look like? You know, I'm also in Austin, so if I were to sign up here. Know, what might it look like for me, and how might that be different if I were, like, further away, for a shipping perspective,

Brian Thomas 20:06

if you're in Austin, then it's you're super spoiled, and you could even come into the warehouse and pick and drop off. We actually have a form of split testing. We actually have a frequently asked question blurb, kind of explaining that, or exactly explaining that, and that was from testing and getting not just purchase feedback, but support feedback. So it was like, what's causing the most friction calls for churn and disgruntled customers. So we added a frequently asked question about it, so how quickly do you show quickly you show perfect?

AJ Davis  20:46

Yeah, I think you know now that I'm thinking through some of the challenges on the business side, but also balancing that, the sort of the messaging around it, I wonder if there's an opportunity to test, you know, as soon as you're done with a puzzle, pick out your next puzzle. Maybe a way to think of it, or, you know, as many puzzles as you complete in the year, something maybe to that vein, just to kind of speak to you to get one at a time. But if you're really expert at it and really like to do puzzles, you'll be able to do a lot of them within your subscription period.

Brian Thomas 21:16

Yeah, definitely that makes sense,

AJ Davis  21:19

Excellent, and I know we're right at times. This always goes so fast. I want to hear back from you. So what are three things that you're going to try out as a result of our time together today?

Brian Thomas 21:30

You nailed it in the beginning. We haven't touched it. We just put some text on there and just went off to the races. That's something I definitely need to go back and reevaluate. The other one we touched, we just touched on it was around unlimited, and that is something, as I mentioned to or alluded to, we're going to rebrand everything shortly, and we are changing the Unlimited, but that's definitely an issue that we're having right now. The third one I do the X out on the do not like, and I also like the little aesthetic of putting do not like and write and maybe even underlining it. So I appreciate you pointing that

AJ Davis  22:09

out. Oh, absolutely. We really appreciate you being on if people would like to reach out to you or to learn more about the company. What's the best way for them to get in touch? Yeah,

Brian Thomas 22:18

You can email me to like directly Brian at Completing The Puzzle, or just go to http://completingthepuzzle.com  and I'll be there somewhere.

AJ Davis  22:25

Well, thanks for taking the time today. What a pleasure. I love what you guys have come up with, and can't wait to share this with our audience. Thanks so much.

Brian Thomas 22:32

Thanks for having me.

AJ Davis  22:34

Thank you for tuning in to the Experiment Zone Podcast. You can check out more episodes on YouTube, Apple, Spotify and your favorite podcast apps. Check out the show notes for any websites Linked In this episode, including where to connect with us on social media. We appreciate you tuning in. Remember to like, subscribe and turn on your notifications so you'll be updated of each episode release and visit us at experimentzone.com for all podcast updates as well appreciate you dropping by you.