Don’t Be Good, Be Great!
August 13th, 2008 by JeremyI’ve written before on the importance of understanding competitive differentiators, a post where I made several comments about how having a good user interface (UI) isn’t enough to compete. I thought I’d circle back to the topic and add some more thoughts.
First and foremost – having a good UI is important and really can make or break a product (TiVo vs Replay, Slingbox vs LocationFreeTV, iPhone vs every other phone ever made). Part of the question at hand is when your UI is an essential component to building a great product. Google, for example, launched with a fairly simple UI, and has for the most part never changed it. Why? Because building a “great” search engine isn’t about UI, it’s about search results.
I’m a big fan of FriendFeed these days, I enjoy the conversations I have there and find it a useful place to get news articles I might otherwise have missed. But FriendFeed (FF) isn’t great right now, it’s just good. You can tell this through a few means, including the fact that users continue to enhance FF via external user scripts while the site itself has only seen modest changes over time. It’s not great because new users continuously ponder what they’ll get out of it and how they’ll use it (instead of just figuring it out right off the bat). It doesn’t stop me from using the product, but it’s my assertion that until it’s great, there’s room for competition – not a good thing for a small startup, no matter how much techie buzz they have.
Michael Arrington wrote a thoughtful post on PR today, in which he writes
So back to practical advice: what do you do if you’re a startup looking for help in getting the word out about your company? First off, don’t hire PR help until the volume of inbound requests by press are simply too much to handle without help. That’s way down the line for most companies.
I commented there that this is a chicken-and-egg issue. How do you get inbound requests without feeding the conversation somewhere? Granted, if you are a well-known figure in the tech world this could easily apply, as your “followers” would pick up on what you are doing. But that is doing PR. If I’m BFF’s with a famous blogger, and I mention I’m starting something new, and he/she blogs about it – I just did PR. Like it or not.
But to Michael’s point, as well as to what Robert Scoble blogged about yesterday, truly inspired products don’t need the same help from PR that others need. When we talk about Bug Labs to open source advocates or gadget enthusiasts, they love the story, it’s not a “pitch”. When we show Boxee to a digital home or media center person, it’s not a “pitch”, it’s a genuinely interesting story. These are examples of great products, but they’re also examples of domain relevance, a key component to any good product marketing strategy.
As I mentioned yesterday, the barriers to entry for starting a new company are negligible. Between $7.99 domains, Google hosted Web Apps, Amazon storage, etc, you can launch companies for dozens of dollars. This plus the swell of 20-somethings coming out of school (or b-school) and who’d rather start their own company than work for someone else is leaving us with a deluge of new start-ups. And with an increase of quantity, it is certainly hard to imagine the quality level is not dropping. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t hear of somebody trying to do something that either sounds like an incredibly tiny niche play or a “me-too” idea.
Being great is hard. But it’s worth it. At Stage Two we work with all of our clients on what we call “product polish”. Our team has a ton of experience in developing award-winning products, and the combination of our expertise along with getting a “fresh eye” on a product tends to produce great results. I like to remind our clients that they have their friends and family to pat them on the back and tell them what a great product/service they’ve built. They hire us to help find the holes in the vision, and transform their good concepts into great end-user offerings.
