One quiz grew Advice With Erin’s Email List by 140,000+ subscribers. Here’s how she did it.
The following is an interview with Erin McGoff, founder of Advice With Erin. My name is Josh Haynam, I’m the co-founder and CEO at Interact quiz software. And I’m interviewing Erin McGoff, the founder and creator of Advice with Erin.
The interview is also available on YouTube if you’d prefer to watch it live.
What results has your quiz driven for you?
Erin: Creating this quiz is one of the best things I’ve done lead generation for my email newsletter. I wanted to expand my list, but I also wanted to provide a lot of value to my audience. So I created a free career aptitude test for my audience. It’s been amazing. I doubled my newsletter size in a matter of four months, I think. And people have found a ton of value through the quiz. My newsletter retention rate is awesome. Everybody’s really happy with it. And that’s pretty much all thanks to this quiz.

How did you come up with the idea for your quiz?
Erin: It’s a good question. So one thing that I’ve noticed through giving career advice to over six million people on the internet is this one thing kept coming up, which I call career confusion. It’s basically just when people don’t really know what they want to do with their life or maybe they’re in a job and they just don’t really like it but they don’t know what else to do. This is a very, very common feeling that most people have. So I wanted to create a quiz that was unlike other career aptitude quizzes. Up until I created my own quiz, I had been recommending career aptitude quizzes to people. These are basically quizzes that you can take online that tell you what your strengths and weaknesses are and what kinds of careers might be a better fit for you. I’ve taken all of them. I took a lot of those quizzes and spent tons of money on them. There were a couple that I liked. But for the most part, I felt like they were either too vague or mostly just outdated. They just weren’t really hip to the modern times. And so I thought, what if I just created my own and it was 100% free?
So I spent a few months, actually I spent a lot of time designing this quiz. It was a ton of work. And I designed my own six profiles and 30 questions. And then the trick with mine though is that I highly encourage people to take it with somebody who knows them sitting next to them. Because I find that with a lot of career aptitude quizzes or anything introspective like that that’s personality based, people aren’t very self-aware.
And that’s okay, that’s just kind of how humans are. I probably think I’m more self-aware than I am. And so it’s really nice to have somebody sitting next to you who actually knows you really well. So when you’re about to click, you know, strongly agree or disagree to a question, they’re like, uh-uh, uh-uh, that’s not you. And that can help yield better results from your quiz. anyway, yeah, I wanted to create this crafty quiz that would provide a lot of value to my audience and help introduce them to careers that not only fit their strengths and weaknesses, but also their personality and their lifestyle preferences. That was a really big thing for me.

How did you know what archetypes to use for the results of the quiz?
Erin: I have been exchanging DMs with thousands, or more like millions of people for years now. So I have a really good feel for the personas of my audience. I kept seeing these six main archetypes pop up over and over again of different types of people in my audience. And so what I did was I just spent weeks and weeks and weeks, like literally in my notebook, writing down what I was seeing over and over again. And I came to the conclusion that there are these six kind of profiles.
The six types are: structured professional, independent professional, hands-on professional, moneymaker, creative, and passionate professional. Everyone that I could think of in my life fit into one of those six categories.
Note from Josh: Don’t under-estimate how difficult this is. Erin had gathered data for years and then synthesized the types of people in her audience down to six archetypes. This is crucial to making a good quiz, if you don’t cover all the types then people will feel left out, if you have too many types then your quiz will take forever and be overly prescriptive. Listen to what Erin said here, it’s great advice.

How did you know what questions to ask in your quiz? And how many questions to ask?
Erin: I had those six result categories, so I could work backwards from there and pepper all of these questions with hints of each of those six so that whenever somebody answered, it went into the algorithm for the quiz. And that was certainly the hardest part because creating questions is really, really difficult. Because every little word can change the meaning of a question.
So I did a ton of beta testing with strangers and also a lot with family and friends. Just asking them to give me feedback on, you know, how did you read this question? What I learned is that every question needed a prompt and an example. So if it was like, I prefer to work at home, or I prefer to work alone rather than with people, the little quote would say, “I’d rather sit on my couch with my laptop than be in a bougie office with a view.” So it would be a little bit more specific.

Note from Josh: This is the quiz opt-in form, it comes up at the end of the quiz, and it’s such a natural part of the quiz process that we didn’t even talk about it on the podcast. It’s just a seamless way to ask people if they would like to opt in.

The story of how Erin discovered Interact
Erin: So when I first decided to make a quiz, I didn’t actually know about Interact. I went to Upwork and I found a quiz engineer, somebody who could make me a quiz, paid them money, and they wanted to use, I don’t know what it was, Jotform, and then create a Zapier that went to ConvertKit and you had to build a custom API. It was extremely complicated and I had to pay for Zapier and Jotform, which were both really expensive. And it was a disaster. It was a complete disaster. We launched it and within 24 hours we reached the max completion limit on Jotform.
They had this awful customer service. I maxed out and they wouldn’t let me upgrade because to upgrade I had to go to the enterprise model because my reel was going viral with my quiz. Everyone wanted to my quiz. It was like 10,000 people like within a few hours. It was insane. It totally crashed. And I was losing leads by the second because job form reached maximum and they had no customer service to talk to. And I’d have to wait until the next business day to call their enterprise team.
My gosh, it was completely awful. So the next day I called their enterprise team and some 24 year old sales guy picks up. He condescendingly talks to me like I’m not big enough for the enterprise model. And I’m like, I’m telling you, I’ll pay you whatever you want. Like I am big enough, trust me. And he basically shrugs me off.
Then you emailed me. I don’t even know how you saw it, but I was complaining on my story about job form and how I was trying to get people this quiz, but it wasn’t working anymore.
And you were just like, I’ll fix, I’ll build your quiz. Like just, I’ll do it. And you got it done. And the quiz was back up and running and it was amazing. You completely came in and saved the day and not only saved the day, but I no longer had to pay for Zapier. I just had to pay for interact and interact talks so nicely to Convert Kit and ManyChat. And I didn’t need to build a custom API or anything because you already did all that. And they all work so nicely together. I.
I don’t think I’ve had an issue at all with any of the connections. And that’s actually rare for ManyChat. ManyChat doesn’t like working with a lot of different softwares, but I don’t know what you did on the backend, but it’s been very smooth for everybody. I love the analytics. They’re way better than job forms. Obviously the customer service you emailed me personally. I just, yeah, I couldn’t recommend it more. It’s, just, I wish I used interact in the first place and I didn’t explore these other, other ones. Because I could have made this quiz myself too. I didn’t need to hire somebody.

Note from Josh: Thank you so much to Erin for sharing this experience with us. Check out the quiz here.