An accidental product launch – the lessons learned from Rapportive (during the launch phase). I paraphrase the lessons below:
1) Offer surprisingly great service: in essence surprise people with the service, you’d be surprised how often customer service sucks. Be responsive, friendly, and helpful.
2) Use a feedback forum: make it really easy to find and provide feedback – no doubt it will wrinkle out most of the low hanging rough edges in your product.
3) Release early: Don’t let others steal your thunder and also let the important people (i.e. the users) help you design the product. Although implicit in this is you listen to your customers! Reed Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn) has written a great essay on this topic.
” If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late”
Reed Hoffman (LinkedIn Founder)
4) Be ready to scale: You never know when you hit that inflection point in the traffic – make sure your system can be scaled in an instance.
5) Build for the press: Not sure about this but the suggestion is since the press spends so much time using blogging etc., may be worth targeting your tech at them if appropriate.
6) Build early: Sort of obvious – those deadlines creep up on you.
I think 1-4,6 are generally good advice. Building to scale is important but perhaps this list misses the idea of small-scale pilots/market research projects. Certainly, this phase is missing from the story. It may take cost/effort to make the product scale and I suggest it might be wrong at the idea inception stage to concentrate more on this than getting the ‘right’ product designed.
Should also be noted that these guys used Y combinator for funding – this is worthy of a separate post as a new style of web-centric ‘VC’ funding for early-stage companies – in their own words helping start-ups from ‘idea to a company’.
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