Remote employment was a squad goal. For my squad, this meant starting an online counseling agency - my wife was a mental health therapist. Even now, acceptable online counselor jobs remain in short supply.

Insurance reciprocity laws had just reached Kansas. This meant insurance companies had to reimburse telehealth at the same rate as in person treatment.

Before COVID, teletherapy could be a hard sale. Potential customers dismissed it out of hand. We were starting from zero - no customers, no presence.

The new laws made success a very realistic goal. We had the skillsets covered. What we did not have was a plan.

We needed Flyover to provide work from home, self-empowering employment.

Flyover would become a secular evidence based counseling resource but first it needed a steady stream of clients.

Quantitatively, I was done when all desired hours were sold to clients within our target demographic.

Qualitatively, I was done when the counselors say, 'Best job ever!' They knew who their clients are - I needed to find them.

First thing was first, I had to make sure we weren't wasting time.

I had to prove the market existed. Flyover needed a customer.

My objective would be measurably complete when Flyover had billed the sale of one hour of counseling.

I educated myself as most eventual customers users would - I googled "counselors near me". I expected local brick and mortar private practices, but what I found - was unicorns.

The market was chock full of venture funded startups. Mental health counseling was getting the SaaS treatment.

I discovered another major market player - directory services. The market was inundated with established directories and many up and comers. These ranged from behemoths, like Psychology Today, to niche players, like Secular Therapy Project.

The presence of unicorns was enough for me to consider the market validated. But was their room for me?

What else can I say? I went to business school and at business school they teach you to do SWOT analysis.

This one reveals an unforeseen opportunity that we then make use of.

As an experiment, we began offering services through BetterHelp and started accepting clients. This allowed the counselor to validate two potentially venture ending doubts.

The counselor wanted to validate online modalities for themself. If they felt online therapy was not an effective modality - we would abort the business plan. If they had determined online just wasn't for them - we would stop.

As a result of this experiment - we had found a customer. We sold one hour of online therapy.

Our first objective was complete. Selling hours through a third party, however, was not ideal. That was contract work - not workplace freedom.

I needed to acquire a customer through Flyover. There is no reason to perpetually give money to a middleman in the therapy transaction.

Acquire a new customer that finds the brand through an ad, schedules a 20 minute free consult, and converts to paying customer.

Measure during consultation with, 'How did you find us?'

SaaS-style corporations, lifestyle businesses, and traditional agencies were all moving into the online space. The market was real and my competition was capturing clients.

I chose BetterHelp and TalkSpace as quality targets from the SaSS domain. I would do what they did - but worse! I am not a venture capital funded team of design geniuses.

Evaluating agency websites was more difficult. Positive examples were tough to identify - I had no access to lifestyle business data. Instead I found negative examples by monitoring online groups - people who were struggling are very vocal in calls for help.

My evaluation yielded commonalities. I broke these down into stories and then broke the stories into requirements. When I finished my quantitative requirements, my qualitative stories should reflect the user experience.

With my requirements in place, I moved quickly to create the MVP. I spent very little time worrying about the content all of my time worrying about the form. As an iterative creator, I had little expectation of hitting a home run, I just needed a starting point.

After launch, I was able to validate usability by asking existing customers to book their next appointment through the interface.

The website was built, it was time to find customers. This meant advertising.

Using the webtools SpyFu and FaceBooks Business Manager, I looked at all ads run by my competitors. These allowed me to see the frequency of each ad as well as the duration of it's run. I assumed a high volume and long duration indicated success on that companies internal metrics.

Using these ads as reference I brainstormed paraphrased copy and combed stock photography for ads. I created a text-based campaign for google ads and a display campaign for Facebook.

I established metrics for ad performance, directory performance, website performance, and most difficultly - the consultation. An ongoing challenge is correlating digital measurement to actual experience.

Whether a measured event translated to an actual event is a very difficult thing to track. An email or call can be initiated by the click of a button - and canceled with one as well.

For ad and directory performance I relied on built in tools from the providers. For website performance I built custom metrics on an as needed basis. For the consultation, I had the counselors ask how the client found us and record it in a spreadsheet.

Quite fortunately, everything was terrible. I'd found some metrics to improve!

I had a web presence that sucked - it was time to improve it. I moved into designing using Figma.

I established BetterHelp and my favorite private practice site as quality targets. I made a sketch in Figma before moving directly into coding.

My design copied my competition by having multiple pages - however, my end result is a single page site. I keep it simple and solved my problems as they presented themselves - multiple pages was never the opportunity hypothesis that made sense. So I never made them!

I established my user's journey from beginning to end as my conversion funnel. By creating a discrete funnel, I could focus on measuring and optimizing each step.

I hypothesized improving our copy would lead to improvements in all 3 problematic measurements. In particular, copy that referenced the counselor. Directory listings were exclusively counselor specific messaging and on the website it was prominent.

I predicted this would help directory performance by appealing to more customers. I predicted this would improve bounce rate by better engaging customers. I predicted this would improve lead conversion because our leads would more often be good fits.

I hypothesized our bounce

I hypothesized our conversions could be improved by optimizing the consultation. I could not record these sessions. Asking for permission to record was not the way to start a therapeutic relationship.

I had the counselors conduct a mock consultation with me as the client while the other counselors watched. As I feigned a litany of weaknesses, I had an a-ha moment. The successful consultant was focused on relationship building, the others were getting started on assessment.

We realized assessment shouldn't start until the first session. After this, all counselors began converting at nearly 100%.

I observed very few customers triggering the 25% event. They were staying long enough to not count as a bounce but not long enough to know what we were about.

I needed customers to go past the fold. I turned to design to solve this problem. I put an arrow at the bottom of the page that broke my margins and I animated it. This sufficed. Suddenly, most users triggered up to 50% - and over 25% ingested the entire page.

Later in development curiousity led me to an even simpler design solution - I made the fold show very less than my margins width on the bottom. This design tension was enough to achieve the same outcome.

Early in this project I used Google tags with Google Optimize to optimize assets. I created diagnosis specific ads and A/B tested them with diagnosis specific copy. My volume was too low to obtain conclusive results. Furthermore, my objective of filling counselor hours was being achieved. It is hard to imagine that a more personal approach would not be more efficient - but it was uncalled for. The objective had been achieved.

There are many places to improve but the asset does it's job and it does it well. Without a new objective, I have no reason to update anything.