Not long ago, software vendors would extol the virtues of their solutions in white papers. Research firms would release sponsored reports to document the emergence or evolution of a certain market space. Marketing people would spend hours crafting the perfect 10-word phrase to put in a print ad.
Now, it seems, all of that is going away.
Of course, the need to explain products, understand markets, and communicate messaging still exists. It’s just that the medium is changing.
As our product evolves to open beta, our team has been having the appropriate discussions (I’m sure these sound familiar): Read More »
Allow me to paint the scenario that inspired this post:
Does not elicit warm fuzzy feelings
We are giving a demo to a new prospect in a key market. It’s going wonderful, and as a final step, we view his screen remotely so he can run through some functions with our oversight.
The minute his screen pops up, my stomach sinks into my feet.
User interface is the most important part of product design.
Ok, maybe it’s also important that the product actually do something useful. But, if the useful bits are too hard to use, guess what — no one will use them.
User interface design is a competitive differentiator. Apple has built an entire company upon making products that do nothing new (or do it worse!), they just make things easier to do. WordPress is popular because of its nice admin interface (which I’m using right now). In fact, a bad user interface can actually put your users in a bad mood! And if users are in a bad mood, they probably won’t want to buy your product. Read More »
Like many early-stage companies, one of our strategies is to learn and apply the lessons taught by others that achieved success and scale. One piece of advice that is stated and repeated frequently is that one must be fanatically focused on the user and build something that users need (or at least desperately want).
Fanatical user focus is so critical that respected authorities like Paul Graham identify it as the single focus that must be served by all efforts. It seems obvious: if you build something no one wants, the business is a non-starter.
Every company has its own unique attitude towards business plans. I recently ran across this post about business plans on Jason Cohen’s blog. Here’s a brief anecdote on my experience with our business plan.
A year ago, we spent hours and hours (weeks, really) writing a business plan. It had lots of impressive spreadsheets, graphics, and financial projections. After we finished it, we put it in a drawer.
Now, a year later, we’ve guided ourselves to a successful product launch and our first customer, and our business plan has not come out of the drawer once. Read More »
I recently ran across the following quote in the book Founders At Work. The quote is by Paul Buchheit, an early-days Googler and the father of Gmail. It made me stop and think about how much risk we encounter every day in business and in life, whether we realize it or not.
“In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” –General Dwight D. Eisenhower
A Good Plan?
It seems that a lot of my day is spent either making a plan, revising a plan, or measuring progress against a plan. We have a product development plan with projects and milestones taken from the product roadmap plan which, together with our marketing plan, informs our customer acquisition plan. It almost as if we need to write a plan-management plan!
And the amazing thing is that despite all that planning, nothing goes according to plan. Read More »
Our latest release involved logging and resolving hundreds of issue reports. I realized early on that if I could report bugs in a way that saved the development team even one minute per bug, we’d eliminate hours of effort.
In other words, outstanding bug reports are the quickest path to the next release.
QA Testing is not the most glorious job. But, like commenting code or creating excellent user documentation, investing 1 minute up front will save 10 minutes of wasted effort, explanation, schedule, and support cost later.
The goal is to drive the average life of a bug to zero. Read on to see our strategy for achieving this.
You have almost no budget. The marketing team consists of…you. You have no market presence to speak of. Does this sound like you? It sure sounds like us.
That doesn’t change the fact that we need to engage with prospects and get product feedback from stakeholders — it’s the only way to ensure product/market fit. . So, how does a new company fill the sales funnel?
One essential technique is to optimize every page on your website for search engines — that way, you help ensure that people looking for solutions like yours can actually find you. Below is the method we used to do our initial optimization.
Not long ago, software vendors would extol the virtues of their solutions in white papers. Research firms would release sponsored reports to document the emergence or evolution of a certain market space. Marketing people would spend hours crafting the perfect 10-word phrase to put in a print ad.
