24HourHomepage.com — Week 21 — A focus on marketing, affiliate sales

3 min readJul 21, 2021

tl;dr: Last week I prototyped some new marketing “stunts” to execute to get more people aware of 24HourHomepage.com. I made a small change to the checkout system to show itemized features at the payment decision point. I also made a browser extension (finally) for the site but we’ll have to wait for Google to approve it for you to use it.

# Overview

Last week, in my effort to make the Internet’s best 24-hour “movie” and get better at sales / marketing at the same time, I focused on costing and prototyping marketing ideas for the coming weeks. I also made a small change to the view customers see at Checkout in hopes of increasing conversion. I also made a simple Chrome Extension for setting the site as your browser homepage though we’ll have to wait for Google to approve it.

# Marketing Ideas 🧠

Previously, I mentioned a valuable conversation about the project I had with Colin Wright. He noted how it looked like I was focusing on sales and not marketing which got me thinking…what have I done recently to get the word out there about the project?

Marketing “stunts” as I’ve heard them called.

Well, lots in the hopper for folks discovering the site asynchronously (podcasts, reddit posts) but not since the Twitter stunt several weeks ago had I tried some new form of outreach.

So I came up with 23 ideas I can build and execute on to grow the site. I costed each to determine if and when they’d be valuable to ship. That meant polling a few friends and strangers to see if they thought the idea was held its water.

One of them—affiliate marketing—I’ll be exploring this week. More on that then.

# Checkout upsell 📈

Stripe—24HourHomepage’s payment provider—is a great tool. Having built billing systems in the past, its a no-brainer to integrate with on a project.

I use their Checkout system which is a minimal, but optimized, way of charging customers. The trade-off is that you can’t customize much in terms of brand.

One idea I logged several weeks ago came from levels.io: add $0 itemized “reasons to buy” in your payment Session config. The customer is buying one product (eg: time on 24HourHomepage.com) but gets reminded multiple benefits at checkout. Brilliant.

# Product Hunt 😻

Remember that video I showed you last week for my Product Hunt launch? I’m scrapping it. It’s a good “trailer” but not a great PH launch video. I have something better planned, something that demonstrates the product value in a fun way.

# This week 🗓

I’ll be prototyping the affiliate sales system. I want more people to help grow the product and I want those people to benefit from it (percentage of sales).