How to talk about your software before launch?
/Buzz is everything these days. I blame Apple for this, remember those lines to buy an mp3 player called the iPod or worse a mobile phone called iPhone? But to be fair “buzz” as a marketing tool - to build up anticipation about products has always been there. Building up of anticipation leads to people talking and that leads to that most coveted of words “viral”. A famous example is the "Get your free email at Hotmail" that when MS started adding to their customers’ email circa 1996 to “talk and hint” about hotmail led to 12 million users in 1.5 years! Wouldn’t you love that for the software you are bringing out the world tomorrow?
“ ... could you put a message at the bottom of everybody’s screen.?”
“Of course we can technically do it,” Smith said.
“Oh, great,” Draper said. “And it can persist, right? You can put it on one message and if he sends an email to somebody else you can put it on that one, too, right?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Smith said, not convinced.
“So put ‘PS: I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail’ at the bottom....”
So if you want to sell your that piece of software that you’ve been dreaming of, spending most of your time, money and energy on then you a have to talk. But how much do you talk? What do you say? Here’s some of our ideas from our 16 years of helping startups build, launch and market their software.
Always under promise and then over deliver
When you talk about the upcoming product to potential customers they will inevitably imagine that your product will do all kinds of things that it may not actually do. Since you are all hyped up and you obviously think your product is the cure for cancer you transmit that enthusiasm in your description. Which is great but if you aren’t careful the picture that your potential user is getting is beyond anything your product will ever be able to deliver. When you finally deliver the actual product, they are bound to be disappointed. Which will lead to bad reviews by word of mouth or worse over the Internet. This will hurt your sales in ways you cannot control. A recent classic (but completely unavoidable though given the situation) was the MagicLeap product. With billions of funding and amazing stories told the actual first version of the product could only disappoint. But if you consider the product by iteself it still is unique and amazing.
The only solution is to make sure you are under promising with the tacit knowledge that when you over deliver the surprise and delight will help.
Keep your dates flexible as much as you can
If you want to keep your promises, you can’t talk about upcoming release dates unless you’re willing to gamble. Software projects have inherent risks of delay. Something can and usually does go wrong, Murphy’s law always wins. Missed release dates leads to disappointment and frustration. And that leads to disregard. In these days of low attention span, once you’ve lost the attention, there is very little chance of you getting it back. So when you talk about your upcoming product keep those dates fuzzy - well you have to tell at some point obviously but say it as late as possible so that the date you say is a reliable one. “Coming soon” probably is too fuzzy but coming this summer is superb.
Keep the story consistent
Classic feature creep. Need to do a course to understand how to use your remote?
Right at the beginning think through what you are going talk about and how much. Keep to that script. If needed practice it. Every external touch point from the website to your chat with a vendor should stick to the original script. Slipping a product feature out means you better have that product feature just the way you described it - so describing it in different ways with ever so little bells and whistles added on is a disaster waiting to happen.
We see this a lot with new founders, who has been dreaming up their product for a while. The actual product that will go out on a 1.0 is usually just 10% of the founder’s original vision. It is a scoped, sane, planned set of features that led to a project plan and timeline. If the founder now drops in his ideas from the 90% that’s left out he has finds it extremely difficult to leave out - leading to the infamous feature creep that destroys software projects.
I have feeling that most TV remotes around this world are results of crazy CEOs bragging about how many things his TV can do over a drink too many :) I can never figure out what most of those buttons do…
Have a company policy about leaks
I know, most startup products are not as famous as Apple or MS and don’t have to have the dramas of leaving as yet unrevealed phones left on at bars. But still, if you are to stick with your story and your plan of keeping to under promise and over deliver you’ve got to put in a policy of what to share about the upcoming product in the company. Developers or designers working on the product will talk about their work with their friends and family. That’s normal human behavior about creative output. So if you don’t lay out a plan, that better be simple, of what and how much to leak you are likely to face a lot of heartache.
OK, I’m done for today. Here’s a great Dilbert for today’s feature creep fear that every developer has nightmares about.
