If you guess that one, I’ll buy you a beer.
When it comes to web applications, Richard White‘s answer is one.
“You only get one shot to impress people; don’t blow it because they won’t coming back next week to see if you’ve improved.” (link)
This is one of the lessons he draws from the demise of his employer, Kiko. Because of a less than perfect first version, nobody seemed to notice the much improved 2.0 release. With a disappointing adoption rate, the founders eventually lost their motivation and called it quits.
While it seems like a strong argument, I don’t think it is actually the right conclusion.
Whatever your target market may be, your pool of potential customers who have never heard of your service is much larger, by several degrees of magnitude, than the people who actually tried it. You may leave the early adopters unimpressed but if you can learn from them and focus on your next users, then you get another chance to make a good first impression.
So how many times can you make a first impression? About 1,043,000,000 times, which is roughly the number of people using the internet these days.
But how are you going to tell those 1,043,000,000 people? Through the press. And those are the people I was *really* talking about. Getting big press is hard to do the first time and exponentially harder the 2nd time unless you a) are already a huge corp or b) really blew up with your 1st release.
Thanks for dropping by.
Getting press is nice and can be useful, but you should have other cards in your hand, especially if your business is supposed to appeal to a mainstream audience.
The buzz you can get from TechCrunch and the likes often falls flat after a few weeks, regardless of the merits of your product. Press in mainstream medias is much more desirable because it matches your target audience, but they rarely cover young and unproven startups anyway.
Press is like the icing on the cake… you usually get it when you are already successful.
What I’m referring to applies to mainstream media just as well the ‘blog press’ (except that they are even more discerning).
If getting press is something you feel comes after you’re successful how do you get users to begin with (since that’s usually the measure of success these days)? Word of mouth? Ads?
I wish I knew the definitive answer to that one. Bloggers are a great way to get some attention and users, but they are more like the other 1 billion of internet users. They are not all at once flocking to your beta release. Instead, as they discover your product over time, they will provide a steady stream of inbound links and traffic. SEO and ads are two other very important options that you shouldn’t ignore.