Finally, Jason Fried of 37signals has confessed —
We don’t have big, long-term plans, because they’re scary…
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/the-way-i-work-jason-fried-of-37signals_pagen_2.html
Just completed a survey for Apple regarding the quality of the repair service for my Mac. One question in particular caught my attention –
What aspect of your repair experience had the greatest impact on your responses to this survey?
Isn’t that pure genious? All that questions they also asked like how quickly the laptop was repaired, etc might not really represent what is important for me and thousands of other customers.
For example, why try to increase the speed of repair if majority of customers would indicate that all they care about is when they are updated about the state of repair in a timely fashion?
If asked directly to rate the speed of the repair, they can answer that it was not good, for a higher level manager such answer might indicate that there is a problem. But the manager in this case thinks that he knows what’s important for the customer when in fact without that additional question in the quote above he doesn’t have any clue.
What seems obvious might easily be wrong.
Having a good program manager is one of the secret formulas to making really great software. And you probably don’t have one on your team, because most teams don’t.
We called this position a product manager instead in Stuffed Guys, but otherwise, it was exactly as Joel described with an addition of doing support as well (since we are a small company, plus support allows to be closer to the actual users and understand better what they need).
At first I was a product manager, then Ivan. But we desperately needed a separate person for that, who will not program and only manage (these two activities don’t mix well). Hopefully next time we will be more lucky and have a good product manager from the start.
This is more a note to myself to use the Joel’s article as is to describe to a person what we need from him or her.
First product released by Stuffed Guys (in what I call “Phase 2″ of the company’s life) was Stuffed Tracker 2.0.
I remember the fear that I had right after the release. There were no sales for maybe 20 first days, we had no evidence that anybody would purchase our software at all. This was very depressing time, especially since we’ve almost burned through all of our money by that time (Stuffed Tracker 2.0 development took about 9 months and we were developing our second product, Factory Nova, in parallel as well).
When one late evening, when I was already at home, I’ve finally got an email notification from ShareIt that somebody just made the first purchase of our product I’ve experienced one of the happiest moments in my life. And I was not the only one so excited, when I’ve sent a text message to Ivan’s mobile (Ivan is the Stuffed Tracker’s one and only programmer) that we’ve just got our first sale, he immediately called me back, although he was out of the city and it was really late at night!
After the first sale, people started purchasing Stuffed Tracker licenses regularly, but for many months, at the beginning of the month, when, for example, we were not getting any sales for the first five days, the fear that there would be no more purchases was returning to me again and again. It seemed that although we had purchases before already, it didn’t prove anything — maybe that was a coincidence, a fluctuation and nobody would buy anything anymore.
Only after five or six months I finally got a feeling that sales won’t stop, that it’s a trend and not a random fluctuation, that we’ve created something that people really want to buy and that the whole products business model works.
I hope this small story will help to build confidence in someone who is only preparing their first software product for a launch. Just create a great product (don’t forget to market it too!) and the sales will come. Guaranteed.
Moral: upsell at point of sale, customers are handing over the money already, so why not give them more buying opportunities.
via The Business of Software – Upselling – Support Contracts.
That’s one of the missed opportunities for us in Stuffed Guys and a note for the future. We discussed this, it’s pretty easy to implement in any sales system, including ShareIt, which we’ve personally used. But we never got around to doing this, unfortunately.
The original post talks about upselling support contracts, we thought about upselling additinal sites licenses for Stuffed Tracker, or additional projects/users licenses for Factory Nova.
I can’t stop thinking after reading a post like this on the 37signals blog that the guys in 37signals just constantly try to find an excuse for themselves. They do the same thing regularly with posts related to their Basecamp and the simple nature of their software.
A business plan. Right. My business plan for Stuffed Guys, for example, predicted the sales almost down to a dollar. Does it make my business planning skills exceptional, standing out of the crowd? I doubt it very much.
Of course you shouldn’t use numbers in your business plan made out of thin air, the numbers should be based on something (in my case — previous experience), but a business plan works, and it sets a clear direction for the company for years.
Listening
