Hollywood or Bust?
I came across two completely unrelated articles in my reading just now, but both carry what’s essentially the same message when it comes to releasing software products. Aaron Schwarz takes issue with 37Signals’ recommended ”Hollywood launch”:
you release a few hints about your product to build buzz, slowly revealing more and more until the big day, when you throw open the doors and people flood your site, sent there by all the blog coverage and email alerts.
He points out that the much-idealised heavy traffic is likely to end up embarassing you, and end up revealing problems that wouldn’t be an issue with fewer, more focussed visitors.
He suggests instead taking a lead from GMail and building up the product and the number of users in an organic, controlled manner through the judicious use of invites not just as a way to get a mystery-factor, but to keep the users limited to those who are going to be useful as testers - people who will actually use the product.
That makes a more sense to me.
He includes a quote from one of the Github developers that I think is worth bearing in mind when thinking about such things:
Let me also say that when we finally did our public launch, there was plenty of buzz, and all of it was the RIGHT kind of buzz. The buzz that attracts real, lasting customers (and no, we weren’t on TechCrunch, that traffic is garbage).
I’d read that (via), and thought it worthy of a bookmark for future reference but didn’t think it was worth the reiteration, but then I came across an interview with Valve’s Gabe Newell, where he’s asked the question “Why do you think that drip-feed mentality works for Valve games specifically?”:
It used to be that you really wanted to have that big first weekend, just like the movies, and that was the best way to deliver products. But in this post -internet world, the best way of getting more customers is not to buy a bunch of ads or put up a bunch of posters in stores.
Your existing customers are the best way to get more customers, and the best way to get them excited is by releasing more content.
In case you’re not aware, Valve have got a lot of fans (in particular from more casual gamers) for the way in which they’ve released a series of free updates to their Team Fortress 2 game. The main focus of these updates has been new weapons for particular characters, but they’ve also been accompanied by a series of videos (such as the latest, “Meet the Sandwich”) that give progressively more insight into the world in which the game is set.
The interview also includes a few glimpses into ‘Steam Cloud’ that seems to imply the Steam content distribution system might be moving towards things other than games, which would be an interesting step:
One of the things we’d like to do is to understand what types of applications people have on their PCs. For example, if a whole bunch of people are running Firefox, then make sure that’s one of the applications they can get through Steam.
There are community features that we want to continue to add. There’s peer-to-peer functionality: the community has this tremendous amount of bandwidth. There’s a whole bunch of content that they’re downloading right now, and being able to replicate that throughout the community using peer-to-peer would be a really good idea. What they need is a structured interface on top of that so they can find the content that everybody’s already downloading. Those are the kind of things we’re looking at.