How to Increase Your Website Conversion Rate (3 Free Fixes Anyone Can Make)

Kayvon Kay (0:00)

Most founders run their website the way people used to take medicine before medicine was a science. Somebody's neighbor tried it, it worked, so you copy it and hope. My guest today doesn't play that game. Sahil is the CEO of Spiralyze, and he built something called Predictive CRO, studying what's already won and lost across hundreds of companies before betting on the pattern. We get into why that happy stock photo on your homepage is probably costing you leads, why your actual product beats any lifestyle shot you've ever paid for, and a two-minute test using nothing but Google Translate that tells you if a stranger can even figure out what you sell.

If you built your site off a template and a feeling, this one's going to sting. This is The Vault. Let's unlock it.

Sahil, welcome to the show.

Sahil Patel (0:56)

Thanks for having me. I'm really glad to be here.

Kayvon Kay (0:59)

All the way from Spiralyze, the business itself. Now, I know before the show we were talking, I'm very excited because this is such in the marketing department of business and A-B testing. And I know that what you guys are doing is revolutionary and it's quite interesting. So I'm excited to get into it. But before we do, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and how we even got to this point?

Sahil Patel (1:26)

Yeah. So my name is Sahil. I'm the CEO at Spiralyze. We're an A-B testing company.

I'm the CEO. I'm a second time doing the CEO thing. So I've been doing different kind of SaaS tech type companies my whole career. And I live in Atlanta, Georgia.

Kayvon Kay (1:44)

Okay. Well, I mean, how did you get into Spiralyze? Where did like, tell us like where that came from?

Sahil Patel (1:51)

Yeah. So it's a fun story. So I am actually not the founder. I was the founder CEO of my previous company, which was a SaaS business.

And I was actually an early customer of Spiralyze. So around the time Spiralyze was just getting off the ground, I started using the product and I saw that it really worked. And it opened my eyes to the power of any...

The power of A-B testing as a way to improve the efficiency of your app, of your website, of your landing pages. That's how I became a true believer. I sold that business. I was thinking about, what's the next thing I want to do? I had stayed in touch with the founder here. He had kept building the business organically, self-funded, was looking for a partner. It was great timing. It also was great because they... I lived in Atlanta already and Spirals is based in Atlanta. So it was a good arrangement. And I had done the solo CEO founder thing wearing both hats. He had been doing it along the way. We both knew how hard that was. There was this mutual understanding of it.

There are some things he's really good at. There's a different set of things that I'm really good at. If we did them together, we thought that would work really well. And it's worked out really well. I've been doing it now for four years.

Kayvon Kay (3:08)

And we are using words like A-B testing, and I'm just assuming there might be people listening. What is even A-B testing? So let's take a step back here and go, okay, let's talk about what are we even talking about right now?

Sahil Patel (3:21)

Let's take this. Let's even step away from marketing, websites, business. Let's just start with something probably everyone can relate to, which is when you have a new medicine, how do you make sure the medicine actually works? Maybe you have a cancer drug, cancer treatment.

You could just guess. You could give it to a bunch of people and then say, did they get better?

You want to make sure it really works. So what do you do? You get a hundred people, you give half of them what's called a placebo. It's like a sugar pill, it's nothing. And you give half the people the actual drug, and you measure how many people got better. And what you want to make sure is that, say you had a hundred people, 50 people, make sure men and women equally distributed, young people, old people, big people, small people, all of those things. Because you want to make sure that the difference wasn't because you put all the men in one group and all the women in the other, and it turns out the drug works really well for men and not so well for women, or some other variable. That's called randomization. That is an A-B test. And it's the gold standard for measuring how effective something is doing. It's not the only way to do it. You can do it before and after. It's not as good. This is the gold standard, something called this, a double-blind controlled experiment. Fancy words, A-B test, same thing.