I have just started working with a new company called Photographic Art Gallery. They have a lot of great offline experience and I’m helping them understand online and social media.
We were talking about how everything goes nuts when you launch and how you never really have enough time to think through about what you’re doing. Embracing the chaos is good, but sometimes it means that you end up just fighting fires as fast as you can, instead of taking solid steps in the direction you want and need to go in.
So we wrote up our priorities for the post-beta period on the whiteboard.
Post-beta launch priorities
1. Test real use – end to end.
This means get as many people as you can from the target market into the system to really see it working. Your end-to-end test should cover the spectrum – finding you, evaluating, registering, using, coming back, inviting, buying, etc. Everything that is in your core utility (and I hope that’s a small set – because you’re focused right?)
2. Drive depth in one geographic and vertical segment.
Just by being online you’re seeding into the wind. Buds will grow in fertile areas but you mustn’t try and cultivate them all. You’re small, new and no one knows you. Give yourself the best chance to build community and viral strength by focusing on a single group (uni students, car salesmen, left handed female doctors) and a single geographical location (SOMA, Barcelona, Broome).
Geography is important (even though you’re online) because the strongest relationships and the best opportunities for longer conversations are still local. You want to increase the chance of the ricochet effect – good customers meeting each other and initiating and enriching a relationship on your platform.
3. Collate and Prioritise Development
There will always be 100 new bugs, 1,000 change requests and 10 new features you want to add. Make sure a single person is using a single system to collate these and a few people are prioritising what gets done. Don’t let great feedback slip through the cracks and don’t try to do it all at once.
Remember: you need to balance listening and ignoring. Customers are great for telling you want they want but they are often bad at innovating and taking big steps forward, if that’s what you’re trying to do. As Nick Hodge reminded me, Henry Ford once said if he’d asked his customers what they wanted they would have asked for a faster horse.
So that’s my take on the priorities of a new web business immediately after they’ve launched their beta.
What’s yours?
What are the post-beta dangers?