The quiz that nearly broke me

I’ll admit it—I'm a little embarrassed, but I’m on TikTok every day.  There’s this account calledSocially Ineptthat keeps popping up as I scroll, with three guys who are like a mix between comedians and tech employees. I haven’t looked them up to fact check their job history, but from their content, it’s clear they’re deep in the Silicon Valley startup world.  They do a lot of crowd work, roasting the audience, which is made up of founders and tech employees who, for some reason, love getting roasted about their jobs or startups. The employees in the crowd always have the most niche jobs working on the most random features at their company—the search function in your email—the recommendations section of a food delivery app, you name it. I couldn’t believe entire teams were dedicated to these small features! But now I get it. Sort of. I just spent about a week and a half sweating over a progress bar for our new quiz.  When I first scoped out our new quiz, I included the addition of a progress bar, which I thought would be just a little addition, quick and easy. I even shared documentation on how it should work and look, thinking I was going above and beyond with those extra references. But guess what? It ended up delaying our new quiz launch by almost two weeks. Whoops. So, to our developer: I’m sorry. 🙂 The thing is, I was firm on having this new progress bar because I believe it will reduce our drop-off rate. There’s some weird psychological stuff behind these small tweaks, and I was committed to getting it right. During the first week of building Sam’s List, I remember Sam telling me: “Kimi: Remember that in this stage, we are in “bull in a china shop” mode. Brute force. Not “make a deck on improving marketing” [img width=722px]//5ac7a397a9cdce6ee24685b64d3ecb28.cdn.bubble.io/f1723566366413x203356559364534100/richtext_content.png[/img] For context, I had just shared a story about something I worked on in the past that I was proud of so he was basically like “Ya cool, I know you know how to improve stuff but we need to skip the formalities, skip the organization, and go full throttle”.  From then on, I knew exactly what needed to be done to move forward. Now, we’re in a phase where we can start cleaning up and improving things that were built on Day 1 when I was acting like a "bull in a china shop" and now need some Tender Lovin’ Care. #MichaelJacksonReference Which brings me to our quiz! This has been my biggest handicap with Sam’s List. The quiz is good—it does what it’s supposed to—but I want it to be even better. Why? Well first of all, it seems a little backwards that people are willing to spend more time taking Buzzfeed quizzes to find out which TV character they're most like, but when it comes to finding an accountant on Sam's List, it was basically a 10 second questionnaire. That's not right... But in all honestly, improving the quiz will strengthen the quality of our leads, and better leads = more revenue.Here’s why I’ve been so desperate to change our quiz:

We have top-tier accountants on our site who are selective about who they work with, so it’s crucial that we capture the right information to properly match each lead to an accountant after they take our quiz

Accountants are game changers for your personal finances and your business. Our quiz should reflect that level of importance, but right now it feels like we’re saying, “Just give us the basics, and we’ll figure it out.”

If we’re going to offer accountants the option to purchase additional leads, we need to ensure that the lead information we provide is of the highest quality, justifying the investment

Our quiz needs to speak to two types of people: (1) The person that has no clue what theyneedand (2) The person that knows exactly what theywant

Taking all of this into account (along with feedback from accountants and users), I finalized our new quiz. After months of pushing this project to the side, I finally scoped out the new build—how it should function, the new questions, the look, everything. I slept like a baby the night I sent it to the developer, knowing I could finally move on to the next project in the pipeline. Then I met Chris Herndon. If you don’t know Chris, he’s one of the co-founders ofApartmentListand has started a bunch of other companies since then too. I’ll credit Chris forever for this new quiz. We met at around 8am PST, and 45 minutes later, I was practically starting from scratch with our quiz.  After our call I had to laugh because I knew it was back to the drawing board and long nights working on this thing.(I filmed the entire process, maybe one day I'll post it. It is extremely chaotic)And that’s exactly what happened, but it’s going to be oh so worth it! After talking to Chris, I’m confident this is the best version of the quiz we’ve ever had.  Sure, we’ll make tweaks over time—that’s a given—but I’m really proud of the core product we’ve built. That’s the latest happenings with Sam’s List! Tell a friend to tell a friend,Sam’s Listhas a new quiz. :) -KimiOh and if you know any awesome accountants in San Diego, let me know! I’ve got 9 more days here and we have a secret project we’re getting ready to roll out, and I’d love to bring on an accountant that I can meet in person! 👀