First Product Struggles
There was a great blog that was posted recently by Matt Mullenweg called 1.0 is the loneliest number(http://ma.tt/2010/11/one-point-oh/) about the advantages of shipping your product as a new company instead of waiting until it is perfect. He was talking about the fact that the product being out on the market is like oxygen and without it the product will suffocate. The imagery is perfect and gives you the perfect sense of urgency for releasing the product.
Seth Godin wrote a blog posting called Alienating the 2% (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/11/alienating-the-2.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader) where he talked about the fact that when you release something then 2% of the customers are going to be unhappy while the other 98% are going to be thrilled with your improvements.
I think that these concepts obviously go together in the fact that you can’t please everyone when you release a product, but if you don’t release the product then you are pleasing no one. The companies that hold onto products until they please everyone are missing a few key concepts. The idea that you are going to please everyone with a product that hasn’t been tested in the market is naive and so the extra effort that you are putting in might not give results. You might be working on concepts that are not going to be well received by the market anyway.
The other takeaway is that the 2% that are unhappy are not the problem, this is your feedback mechanism. You want to put the product out in the market and see what people are saying about it. That is the biggest advantage of a social media marketing strategy. This gives you the opportunity to quickly get feedback and adjust your product for another release. In the extreme sense there is the concept of agile development, where software is released many times per day sometimes, they get instant feedback and they adjust the product according to the customer’s needs. This technique is growing in popularity. The biggest issue to this is to make sure that you are not developing to please the 2% of naysayers and not to satisfy the happy 98%; this is a balancing act.
Jason Collis