What Gets Measured, Gets Improved With PickFu's Anthony Cofrancesco

Andy Splichal  0:03  

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. And today I'm being joined by a special guest. This guest represents the company PickFu. Pickfu provides an extremely useful tool when it comes to improving the conversion on your website. And what tool is that you might be asking? It is instant market feedback. A big welcome to Anthony Cofrancesco. How are you doing, Anthony?

Anthony Cofrancesco  1:19  

Hey, Andy. Thanks so much for having me on the show today. I'm really excited to be here. I'm doing great.

Andy Splichal  1:24  

Well, great. Thanks for joining us. Now before we dive into today's topic, which is what gets measured gets improved. Let's hear a little bit more about you and ab PickFu.

Anthony Cofrancesco  1:34  

Sure. So my background I guess for the past three or four years, I actually started off in a career with Amazon. I worked there for about a year and fulfillment center in Houston and then also in Tampa doing operations management. So got to kind of see behind the scenes on on a lot of things regarding Amazon and got to see inside of the company culture and really enjoyed that job a lot. But around after working there for about a year, I got an opportunity to really dive into the Amazon FBA space. And a good friend of mine that I had known and started other businesses with said, Hey, I've got a creative agency out in the Philippines called Virtuous Graphics. Why don't you quit your job at Amazon, moved to the Philippines and help me help me scale this creative agency all based on conversion optimization. So I thought this is crazy. But I knew I'd end up regretting it if I probably didn't take that decision. So I quit my job. And Amazon moved to the Philippines and for almost two years help scale creative agency to more than 20 full time creative workers. And we really did everything for the Amazon listing. So photography, graphic design, copywriting and video and helped hundreds of Amazon sellers really get just absolutely killer conversion rates. So back in September of 2019, we sold that business to a private equity firm, and I made a little bit of money, but not enough money never work again. So PickFu was actually a real big part of our agency, we actually integrated PickFu into our service offerings for our clients. So I had met Justin and John at a at a conference, the founders of PickFu. And I hit them up around in early 2020. And I said, Hey, I think this is the coolest tool in the world. And I had heard about it at an advanced workshop for at an Amazon FBA conference in Hong Kong. And it was still kind of it was a really helpful tool. But it was it was one of those really well kept secrets. It's like the advanced sellers almost didn't want other people to know about it, because it was such a powerful tool. And so I approached the founders of PickFu. And I said, I really think this could be and should be used by every ecommerce seller. And I'd love to work on making that happen. So that's that's kind of the story I started with March, started with them in March. And I've been working with them for about the past nine months as their industry liaison. And I'm real fortunate that my my job is really just to work with with people in the industry help build out case studies and show the applications of using pick foo. And yeah, Pikfu real quick is just, and just one quick sentence it's instant consumer feedback. So if you're a business owner, if you're an E-commerce seller, rather than going with your gut, rather than asking your spouse or your partner and saying, Hey, babe, like what do you think about my product packaging, taking a little bit more of a data backed approach? And I guess that's kind of what we'll be talking about today is using PickFu to make better decisions with your creative assets and with your with your launches in general.

Andy Splichal  4:30  

Oh, that is a fascinating backstory. You know, so in business, what I find to be one of the most useful statements for business owners is what gets measured gets improved. And I find that the service that PickFu offers is extremely useful when it comes to measuring with the goals of improving especially in conversion rates. Is that how you would see PickFu as well?

Anthony Cofrancesco  4:53  

Absolutely. So there's definitely the biggest application is in terms of going through more multiple iterations on different things, whether it's the look and feel of your website, whether it's your product packaging, whether it's your images, going through different iterations, creatively and using PickFu to get feedback. The other real big advantage in terms of the PickFu is there's really cost savings and making sure that you don't go down this spiral of a direction that you don't want to go in. So basically, you know, before you go and launch a product, right before you go and print your product packaging 1000 times, and you wait months for it to get shipped over from wherever it's being shipped to, don't just go with what your designer send you first, get some feedback and make sure you're not making a fatal mistake, or a really big error that's going to end up costing you later down the road.

Andy Splichal  5:42  

Yeah, no, I like that. I mean, there's there's a lot of stuff I'm sure you could test from book covers for a graphic artist or two elements on your website, what, what are some of the common things that ecommerce companies test using PickFu? 

Anthony Cofrancesco  5:58  

Yes, so in terms of e-commerce, the biggest things for sure, are going to be things that the customer is visually going to see. So that's going to first start off with if you're selling on Amazon, that's going to be something like your main image, even if you're selling off of Amazon product packaging is probably the biggest thing, right? Before someone can actually decide that they want to buy the product, a lot of the times, they're going to want to, they're going to see the packaging for so imagine supplements, imagine consumer packaged goods, any kind of food products, right, you could just stick whatever kind of supplement in a bottle. And if the bottle doesn't look good, are people going to buy it, you know, if it's a food product, or people going to buy something, think about when you go to the grocery store. Think about how dynamic and how good looking all the packaging is. And that's all very, very intentional, as well, two different elements on your website, or in your storefront, whether that is the color of your buttons, or whether that's the layout of an infographic, you got to think when someone's shopping online, if you're thinking about in terms of conversion rate, everyone who's shopping, they're distracted, right? The kids are running around in the background and the phone's going off. It's COVID craziness going on. And so like you have a very limited time as the seller to get the person into your little bubble and convince them yes, they found the product that they're looking for, and needed to quickly overcome their objections so that they'll add it to the cart. And so the biggest applications of PickFu really come down to Okay, are you actually able to grab that customer out of their, their distracted environment and make them and push them to make the buying decision about your product?

Andy Splichal  7:34  

Yeah, no, that's great. You know, it kind of leads me to story I had earlier this week, I had one of my private clients. And I was talking to him about our recent site redesigned, they did it, I was asking them why they decided on the color for their Add to Cart button. And why they opted not to add some language below that Add to Cart button regarding some free shipping? And their answer was we did what we thought looked good. But I believe that PickFu would be very valuable for this type of feedback. What do you say on that?

Anthony Cofrancesco  8:06  

I think it's a really good point. And it's probably a really good application. The thing is, some people who might be listening to this, they might say, well, you're testing the color of your Add to Cart button, or maybe you're testing if you're gonna put different language on there. And so some people might say, Well, why don't you just run like a normal AB test on your website using a split testing software? And so that's definitely an option. There's no question about that. But what really makes PickFu unique is that if you run a split test, first and foremost, it's going to take a little bit of time, right for an effective test to run, you're not only going to have to have enough traffic to get enough data points to make a decision. But it's also it might take two weeks, it might take four weeks for that test to actually run. What's very unique about PickFu is that we have a panel of people that are standing by these people are paid, and they're going to they're going to answer those questions very quickly. So most pick through tests on like a normal split test, which might take two plus weeks, a pick through test is going to be done in 30 minutes to an hour. The other really big advantage, Andy is that when you actually let's say you run a split test, and you test a different color of an Add to Cart button, right, and let's say you're testing, just for example, you're testing blue, versus you're testing in yellow, right. And for whatever reason, the blue wins, the only thing you know at that point is that blue one, but you don't know why it won, you don't know the feedback as to the methodology or the rationale behind why the customer click that button. And so what's really interesting about PickFu is if you're testing things that are more dynamic, or that have multiple points on it, so maybe you're not just testing the color of the button, but you're testing the color of the button, and then you're also deciding to put some text that says add to cart or maybe you're putting a little icon or you're testing multiple different factors at once. When you put those things into pick foo people are not just saying I like option A or I like option B they're actually required to give you detailed feedback as why they chose that specific option. And that's kind of where the magic happens. That's where you get these unique insights from all the people that are answering the question.

Andy Splichal  10:08  

Yeah, no, that's great. Now let's talk like when somebody first signs up with PickFu, how does it work? What's What's the process like for listeners who might be interested?

Anthony Cofrancesco  10:19  

It's super easy. And we wanted to make it as simple as possible to get started. So first and foremost is you don't need an account, you don't need a subscription to get started, you literally just go to the website and the top right hand corner, you'll see a button that says New poll, right? And then all you're going to do is you're just going to go and you're just going to literally type in your poll question. We recommend that people just give some context. So let's say you're trying to get feedback on a main image, for example, for let's say, a travel water bottle. So you'd literally just type in your question, which image do you prefer for this travel size waterbottle, right. And then all you're going to do is you're just going to very quickly upload your images. So you have two different options, you can put in up to eight options at a time. And you're just going to upload your images. And that's it right from there, you can refine down to your audience. So you can segment by different characteristics and factors, a really common one is people will want to filter by an audience of Amazon Prime customers. But you can filter by things like gender, age, range, income, ethnicity, whatever you might want to do, if they drink wine, if they're a pet, if they're not, if they're a pet, but if they have pets, if they're a parent, whatever it might be. And so it's literally just a few clicks. And then once you click start, the poll is gonna run, and the UI is really cool, it'll actually, if you have it open in a tab, it'll tell you, you know, hey, 10, people are responding. And it'll give you like an active count up until you reach you know, what the most common thing is people will pull 50 respondents, and then within about 30 minutes to an hour, you're gonna have actually real feedback from real people answering those questions, and it all starts at about 50 bucks. That's the starting price. It's just $1 per response. And, again, we really didn't want to lock people into Subscriptions. So you know, if you're running more than three polls in a month, which a lot of our users are, then you're gonna definitely save money with a subscription. But if you're just trying it out for the first time, just go and run an individual poll. And in fact, if you if you use your code, which I think will show in the end, you'll even get 50% off your first poll. So instead of 50 bucks, you can try it out for $25. Which to get real feedback. It's, it's definitely much, much better and much more effective than going and asking random people on the street.

Andy Splichal  12:31  

Sure. No, that's, that's great. Now, who is providing the answers? Who, who's given the feedback?

Anthony Cofrancesco  12:38  

Sure, that's a question we get all the time. So first and foremost, these people are number one, they're all real people. They're all based in the United States. And they're all native English speakers. These people are part of a third party panel service that we use. They're paid for their responses. And yeah, they're just, they're just normal people. They're like, you know, some of them are, you know, they're working. Some of them are stay at home. You know, folks, it's, it's there, just a wide cross section of people. And there's more than 10,000 people on the panel.

Andy Splichal  13:10  

Oh, that's great. Now, how long has PickFu been around? How many? How many polls has PickFu handled?

Anthony Cofrancesco  13:18  

We we've handled 1000s and 1000s polls. We've been around for more than eight years now. PickFu actually originally started the founders, Justin and John, when they created the company, it was kind of out of a need for themselves. They were actually working on a another website, which which kind of consolidated restaurant menus. And they were both engineers, you know how hard they're really not creatives. And what was happening is they would consistently butt heads and say, I like this design. And they're like, No, I like this one. And so they actually created pic food just for themselves internally. And what ended up happening is they posted Pikfu, just a really basic concept of PickFu into just a group chat more or less, and people started using it, people started really liking it. And so actually before ecommerce, we actually had much bigger verticals in like publishing. So like, if imagine, if you want to publish a book, you know, the book could be amazing, there could be really, really great content. But if the cover isn't good, you know, no one's gonna buy it, no one's gonna pick it up, whether it's a digital shelf or a physical shelf. And so e commerce really just started blowing up over the past couple of years, because I think we people really started to see, hey, the competition in terms of e-commerce was getting really, really high. And you know, again, you really shouldn't just go to your your partner, you really shouldn't just go to, you know, random friends or family or ask your Facebook network and say, Hey, what do you think about my product packaging? You should probably take a little bit more of a professional approach to getting that feedback.

Andy Splichal  14:46  

Right. Now, do you have any favorite success stories? I saw there's a ton of testimonials on your website. But do you have any like a favorite case study or success story that you could share with the listeners?

Anthony Cofrancesco  14:59  

For sure. Yeah. The one that I love saying we have some that are in mobile game development, we have others in publishing. But my favorite for e-commerce comes from a company called Thrasio. Thrasio is kind of made some really big headlines recently. They're essentially, they acquire different Amazon businesses, they find areas where they can make improvements, and they're a private equity fund. And as the value of the business goes up, the value of their fund goes up as well. And so they just made headlines recently as the fastest profitable company in the US to reach unicorn status, so a billion dollar valuation. And we they've been using PickFu for years for years and years. But we did a case study recently with them all around a brand of a pet deodorizer, called Angry orange. And basically, what they did is they use PickFu, to optimize their product packaging to go from there, when they acquired the brand to their new packaging, which is which looks really sleek, it's really clean, looks just fantastic. And what happened was just through the changes that they made with PickFu, iterating, on that product packaging, they were able to grow that brand from $2 million to now more than $20 million in sales. And that was just from iterating their product packaging, and it makes sense as to why that works. Like it was already a good selling brand. I think a lot of ecommerce sellers would be really stoked to have a brand that does $2 million, or is worth $2 million in total value. But then you can check this out on our website, you can see the full case study just how significant the changes were. And it was a lot of Pikfu tests that they used to get there. But it was definitely worth it in the end like you think about spending maybe $1,500 to $2,000 in terms of customer feedback, but then you look at the impact that it can have on your sales, it's it's pretty substantial. And if you check out that website, or rather, if you check out the testimonial we have we have a real quick YouTube video, you'll see the the VP of John Hefter, their VP of creative and brand strategy saying that they used to pick through in every major creative decision. And that's kind of what we recommend is like you don't need to use PickFu for everything. But when you're getting to the point of like pulling a trigger on a product launch on picking your product packaging on really optimizing something significant. Again, don't just go with your gut. Think about think about taking a more professional approach in terms of feedback.

Andy Splichal  17:19  

Yeah, no, that's great. And just so it's kind of an odd name. So that's pickfu.com. That's right. Yeah. Okay, cool. Now, do you have any special offers or incentives going on right now that you would be available for listeners who would maybe like to give it a try on testing something?

Anthony Cofrancesco  17:36  

Yeah, for sure. So one of the things that we started recently, is having bundled pricing options. So like I said earlier, you don't need a subscription to use PickFu. But once you start doing more than three polls, then it makes sense to have a subscription. And so one of the questions that we got a lot, especially as we're getting into Q4, especially as people's volume is going up, they were saying like, hey, I want to run multiple polls back to back. But I want a special deal, I want a special discount for buying in bulk. So we created these bundled pricing options that again, were specifically made for Q4. And so they're like three polls, five polls, we have ones for authors for game developers. And so we have some pretty special deals on that right now, I will say it only goes until the end of the month. So it ends at the end of October. But those are some sweet deals, you can check them out at pickfu.com/bundles. If for whatever reason, you're not able to get in on the bundle deal. It really it really will end at the end of the month, we don't like extend these promos. That actually is the it's a hard stop on that date. But for anyone who doesn't make it in on that we do have a discount code as well, for anyone listening to this, they can use the code true online or to go to pickfu.com/true online, and you'll get 50% off of your first poll. So like I said, 25 bucks, easy way to start.

Andy Splichal  18:53  

That's great. You know, one thing I like to ask all the guests is, what problem do you summarize that PickFu solves for its customers?

Anthony Cofrancesco  19:03  

Yeah, it's really, really quite simply, it's just real access to real consumer feedback fast, right? Getting a sanity check when you're doing this in. And I've met a lot of ecommerce entrepreneurs that really are very independent when they're doing this when they're going through the process when they're going through the creative process. So what I hear all the time and we just did a case study recently with probably one of the biggest, the biggest course providers like the biggest educator in terms of the Amazon FBA space. And at the end of the case study what he said is he said at the end of the day, like I'm too close to my product, right? Like I I know the product, I've been looking at this for years and you start to you start to not view things from the way that the customer will view things or what is equally frequent. Is that the product you're selling, you're not even close to your target market, right like I know guys that are selling products that are selling specifically intended for older women, right? Or like vice versa, whatever it might be. And so like, how do you honestly make good decisions on what that customer wants when you're not in your target market. And that's really where the value of Pickfu comes in. It's like, you can solve that within 30 minutes to an hour and start getting some good insights from real people.

Andy Splichal  20:16  

Sure, that makes a lot of sense. Now, if someone is interested in your service, or have some questions for you, how would they get in contact with you or ask questions on Pickfu?

Anthony Cofrancesco  20:27  

For sure, yeah. Anyone who wants again, like I said earlier, my only job here at PickFu is to is to help out sellers to be active in the community. So if anyone has any questions, if, you know, even if it's not related to Pickfu, if you just want an extra set of eyes on your listing, or you just have a creative question, you know, I've got a lot of experience there. If you want to help setting up a Pickfu question, if you want to know, hey, is PickFu a good application for the thing that you're curious about? They can hit me up anthony@pickfu.com and help we happy to help out in any way.

Andy Splichal  20:56  

All right, great. Now, is there anything I missed all my questions today?

Anthony Cofrancesco  21:00  

I think that's everything. Andy, I really appreciate you having me on. This has been fun. 

Andy Splichal  21:04  

Well, well, that's it for today. So remember, if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave a five star review. And if you're looking to test and improve your website using instant market feedback, and you can contact Anthony and anthony@pickfu.com or you can contact him through the Make Each Click Count Facebook group Anthony has just joined to Make Each Click Count Facebook group. So if you have any questions directly for him, feel free to ask him in there as well. Would that be okay, Anthony?

Anthony Cofrancesco  21:32  

That sounds awesome. Thanks again.

Andy Splichal  21:33  

All right, great. Well, that's it. In the meantime, remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I will talk to you in the next episode.