Test It, Then Promise It

Yesterday Verve Advertising sent its first offer to violin shops, luthiers and bow makers. It was a simple idea. These are people I've known about for years through the fiddle and mandolin groups I run on Facebook, but most of them don't know me, and trust in this business has to be earned. So instead of asking anyone to buy anything, we offered to do one thing for free: set up a TikTok account for their shop and post three short videos about their work, made from photos they already have online. Shops that were already on TikTok could have a free Linktree instead, one tidy page that gathers their website, store, contact details and social accounts behind a single link. No charge, nothing to sign, and the account is theirs to keep.

Seventeen shops got that email. And then I did what I should have done first. I asked Dex, the AI office helper that handles a lot of Verve's paperwork and setup jobs, to actually make one of these accounts from start to finish, using a real business as the test case.

The test case

The obvious choice was Emily's Violins, a luthier supply business I know well. It has been selling bow hair, tonewood and tools to violin and bow makers since 2004, it has a blog with products, ordering and contact pages, and it has a Facebook group for violin and bow making tools and supplies. In other words, it looks a lot like the shops we wrote to. If the offer works for Emily's Violins, it should work for them.

I set the rule before we started: do it the way we'd do it for a customer, on the free plan, with no trials and no money spent, and keep track of how long it takes and where it gets fiddly.

TikTok said no

TikTok was the main offer, so it went first. Dex made a fresh email address for the shop, filled in the sign-up form, got TikTok's verification code and entered it. Then it pressed Next, and nothing happened. No error, no message, no account. We tried again from scratch, with a valid code, and got exactly the same silence. TikTok simply would not let the account be made that way, and it never said why.

That was the end of the TikTok offer, at least for now. I can't promise a shop something I can't deliver, so it came off the Verve website the same afternoon.

Linktree, with a nudge

Linktree went better, though not on the first try. Signing up is easy enough: there's no password at all, just a six-digit code sent to the email address each time you sign in. Dex got the account made, set the name to Emily's Violins, uploaded the logo and wrote the bio. But every time it finished the free setup, Linktree put up a full-page invitation to start a seven-day Pro trial. The only way off that page was a Skip button, and Skip led right back to choosing a plan, which led right back to the trial page. Around and around. After a few laps Dex stopped and reported back instead of starting a trial we didn't want.

So I signed in myself, on my own computer, and got past it. Once a person had cleared that screen, Dex went back in and added the five links in order: the blog, the products page, how to order, the contact page and the Facebook group. One more small snag, the title and bio box refused to save from the links page, so Dex used the separate header editor, which worked fine. A few minutes later the page was live at linktr.ee/emilysviolins, with the logo, the bio and every link working.

What I learned

Free tools aren't always free of friction. Neither of these problems would show up on a sales page, and neither would have shown up if we'd just assumed. TikTok wouldn't play at all. Linktree works, but it needs the owner to click through one screen before the rest can be done, which is a quick job for the shop and something we can walk them through. That's a very different offer from the one I described in the email, and now I know exactly what it is.

The bigger lesson is the order of operations. Test it, then promise it. From here on, anything Verve Advertising offers a client gets built for a real business first, timed and checked from the outside, before it goes into an email. Emily's Violins has a nice new Linktree out of it, and I have an offer I can actually stand behind.

Try it before you sell it.