We ran an experiment where we added a banner to the main in-product dashboard to promote a time-based offering (invest in the YC Demo Day Funds). We were hoping to understand what the best additional channels were for driving activity from the investors on our platform. We tried a few channels (mentions in signup emails, email blasts, in-app mentions, etc) and this was the report we created to track the progress of one of those channels.

In order to decide which channels to test out, we looked at existing activity and volume. We decided that the dashboard had enough visitors that we could get an understanding if the lift was enough to justify continuing to use the precious space in our dashboard. We did a similar thing with other channels - how many of a certain email was sent, how many new users were signing up, how many other users were actively making investments on any given day...all of that info helped us line up a hypothesis for each.

Everyone internally who was involved with this campaign (whether they were running the Demo Day funds themselves or had a vested interest in it) had access to this report. I was the only person checking it on a daily basis, and I would provide updates weekly that recapped how it was going to a main Slack channel.

The numbers in this artifact have been altered to protect confidentiality. However, we found the conversion rates from clicked > signed closing to be much higher than we had anticipated. And we also found the the time to close was far, far faster than we had originally anticipated.

This banner performed better than any of our other channels. As a result of this experiment, we learned that this needed to be a part of our ongoing motion every time we ran a new Demo Day fund (twice yearly). We also unlocked this banner as a means for other initiatives across the business to get the type of exposure or conversion they needed. For example, our tax team has leveraged it around tax season to drive specific required activity from our investors.

Matt Bilotti

We ran an experiment to understand the best additional channels for driving investments into a specific twice-yearly campaign we run (YC Demo day funds). This is the Metabase report we created to track the experiment’s progress (all numbers have been changed).

We ran an experiment where we added a banner to the main in-product dashboard to promote a time-based offering

In order to decide which channels to test out, we looked at existing activity and volume

Everyone internally who was involved with this campaign (whether they were running the Demo Day funds themselves or had a vested interest in it) had access to this report

Dashboard to Track Promotion of Investment in YC Demo Day Funds at AngelList

Demo Day Dashboard

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