I’ve found that in general for a V1/Beta launch, teams are too focused on technology and not focused enough on customer pain points, user experience and the market. Why? Because by definition, they don’t have much customer experience yet!
If you don’t have any pre-launch customer experience then what makes you think you know anything about the market? If you don’t know anything about the market then why launch now? Seriously.
The more user-feedback can be heard and acted on before the product is launched the more you can plan for how the market will react to your strengths and weaknesses. This might seem obvious but many entrepreneurs in particular still hold onto the belief that the “big bang” launch comes first and working with customers comes later.
The second thing is to set customer expectations at a level where you can meet them. Again, a bit of pre-launch customer work goes a long way to helping you understand what those expectations will be. Sounds easy right? If it was, I wouldn’t see so many hated, over-hyped products out there struggling to survive.
Let’s compare two recent product launch examples: Cuil vs. Google’s Chrome.
Cuil is a well-funded startup staffed with ex-Googlers with a search engine that “searches more pages on the Web than anyone else-three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.” A better search engine than Google! Who doesn’t want to give that a try? The launch was massive. Hundreds of articles were written about Cuil in the run up to the release date including the New York Times, even though no media (or anyone else) had been allowed to actually see the product. On the launch day, there wasn’t a person I know that didn’t give it a try. The problem was that the searches weren’t better than Google. The most common first search – a search on one’s own name, returned laughably bad results. Even a search on “Cuil” didn’t seem to work. The feedback was overwhelming negative. The bottom line – Cuil sucks.
Contrast this with the Chrome launch. At least a few folks in the technical media, namely Walter Mossberg at the Wall St. Journal and the folks at Wired were given access to the product well in advance. Chrome was released as a “beta” and not V1. Sure that’s standard for Google but read the coverage. Press and bloggers alike have lower expectations for a beta product. Lastly, they published a concise “ features ”page that explained in plain terms, why users should care about each of their key features. Virtually all of the coverage mentioned the “omnibox” which would not have been an obvious feature if you weren’t told it was there in the first place. Here is a quote from the New York Times the day of the launch:
“It’s best to think of Chrome as exactly what it purports to be: a promising, modern, streamlined, non-bloated, very secure alternative to today’s browsers.”
Was the launch a success? There were reports that 2% of the market downloaded the product. Lehman Brothers thinks that Chrome could reach 20% market share in 2 years. The bottom line – Chrome has great potential.
And hey, did I mention that this blog was still in beta?
Subscribe to this blog or follow me on Twitter or Friendfeed
Launch strategies for new web based apps is a very interesting area. I have been told by more than one entrepeneur in the last month that the “get it out there and let the community fix it” ala Twitter strategy drives more users.
Who would have thunk it. Can’t say i’m convinced but the Cuil/Chrome user data will be another useful datapoint.
Again, I think it’s ok as long as you set the expectations correctly. You have to say it does *something*. If you say it’s “like Twitter but better” it needs to be better in the way you say it is or nobody will stick around to fix it.
I totally agree that people will often use products in unintended ways but you have to have at least one intended use to get folks to stick around.
I agree that CUIL just sucks! I tried again this morning after reading your blog and it still has my blog cached from 2 months ago.
Impressive indeed.
Things haven’t gone well for them post-launch either. They lost their VP Products (ex-Google) and the traffic is still trending downward (according to Google trends). More importantly they did not manage to insert themselves into the “cuil sucks” conversation to try and turn that around in any way, nor have they attempted to restate their value proposition. Like you, I think many people would be willing to give them another chance if we could understand just what Cuil is really good at. I know I would.