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Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software

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Re: Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software

#21

Post by yan »

I think it boils down to how comfortable you are with your product.

If your stuff feels iffy and has less-than-ideal engineering practices, the slow and steady launch might work great. Expose enough of your idea to keep people idling around and begin free beta testing.

This isn't bad, per se. Everything is a trade off, and if engineering skill or time is not something you have an excess of, the slow and gradual launch can work.

On the other hand, if you have experience building and scaling and are confident that: a) the core of your idea is apparent in your product, and b) you did enough testing that things won't break on launch, by all means, build the hype and open the flood gates on launch day.

Re: Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software

#22

Post by run4yourlives »

The big elephant in the room that nobody here seems to be taking into consideration: 37Signals charges their users to use their product.

The Hollywood launch allows for such a case, whereas this example makes that much more difficult. Do you force beta users to pay? Do they pay the same amount as others? Etc etc.

Hollywood launches allow you to broadcast a product as "finished". The issues Aaron cites seem to arise from broadcasting the "finished" announcement when the product is clearly not in that state.

Re: Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software

#23

Post by aaronsw »

tptacek wrote: post #3

37Signals has launched four (4) commercial products, and takes in (by my guess, from headcount and subscription numbers) mid-high 7 figures from them. Aaron Swartz has launched, by my count, no successful products (unless I'm wrong and Reddit wasn't already a success story when he got there). From Aaron's own web page, here's what I get when I click on his "my day job" link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29804691@N02/…

Geez, that's a lot of ad hominem. Did I accidentally murder your dog or something?

I wasn't saying anything about what 37signals does, I was criticizing what they recommended. You know, in their book. That I link to in my first paragraph.

Re: Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software

#24

Post by spolsky »

tptacek wrote: post #7
spolsky wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're finished with the ad hominem part of your attack, I'd just like to weigh in and say that Aaron got this exactly right.

Aaron advocates avoiding the "Hollywood Launch", marketing your product only after you've verified that "random people" are satisfied with the offering. I'm asking you: are you saying that after Fog Creek spends 9 months building and testing a product, dogfooding it with internal users, and running closed beta testing, that you would avoid publicity for it until random paying customers started liking it? Because I fe…

again, with the ad hominems!

Re: Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software

#25

Post by [deleted] »

spolsky wrote: post #24
tptacek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aaron advocates avoiding the "Hollywood Launch", marketing your product only after you've verified that "random people" are satisfied with the offering. I'm asking you: are you saying that after Fog Creek spends 9 months building and testing a product, dogfooding it with internal users, and running closed beta testing, that you would avoid publicity for it until random paying customers started liking it? Because I fe…

again, with the ad hominems!

[deleted]

Re: Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software

#26

Post by tptacek »

aaronsw wrote: post #23
tptacek wrote: post #3

37Signals has launched four (4) commercial products, and takes in (by my guess, from headcount and subscription numbers) mid-high 7 figures from them. Aaron Swartz has launched, by my count, no successful products (unless I'm wrong and Reddit wasn't already a success story when he got there). From Aaron's own web page, here's what I get when I click on his "my day job" link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29804691@N02/…

Geez, that's a lot of ad hominem . Did I accidentally murder your dog or something? I wasn't saying anything about what 37signals does , I was criticizing what they recommended . You know, in their book. That I link to in my first paragraph.

So, while 37signals doesn't break it out as clearly as you did, they do in fact recommend the same closed testing that you're recommending. For instance, in their book "Getting Real", they talk about how they do closed beta testing of individual features inside of their applications to selected groups of users, just like Google Mail does. They also publicly did closed beta testing of Highrise, their most recent application. I'd be surprised to hear that they didn't quietly test Basecamp before it shipped.

On the other point, I think I felt like in a discussion of whether we should be doing things this-way-or-that just because somebody said so, your resume was fair game. I think differently of that now. I'm sorry I offended you.

Re: Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software

#27

Post by jimgreer »

We actually did the same thing for Kongregate. Except we gave out an invite code to everyone who asked - usually same day. So the artificial scarcity was... artificial. But if we'd had a big problem we could have stopped the invites.

We did that for about two months and then took the invite barrier down. Worked for us.

edit: I forgot the second half of this story. A few months after we took the invite barrier down, we decided to do a "Hollywood" launch - really all we were doing was changing the "alpha" to "beta" and releasing some new features (earning cards by playing games). It worked, we got lots of press. Fox News even called and asked if I could go on their afternoon cable show. I did (here's the video - http://tinyurl.com/2gpz7x). Our site immediately cratered - it was a much, much bigger surge than Digg. We got it back up in about 20 minutes and the follow on traffic was good as well.

So I guess we did a hybrid Gmail/Hollywood.

Re: Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software

#28

Post by eugenejen »

aaronsw wrote: post #23
tptacek wrote: post #3

37Signals has launched four (4) commercial products, and takes in (by my guess, from headcount and subscription numbers) mid-high 7 figures from them. Aaron Swartz has launched, by my count, no successful products (unless I'm wrong and Reddit wasn't already a success story when he got there). From Aaron's own web page, here's what I get when I click on his "my day job" link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29804691@N02/…

Geez, that's a lot of ad hominem . Did I accidentally murder your dog or something? I wasn't saying anything about what 37signals does , I was criticizing what they recommended . You know, in their book. That I link to in my first paragraph.

No, he is testing Jason Calacanis's approach to PR. By attacking Aaron Swartz ad hominen, he raises his fame/notoriety in hacker community.

Oh. I just forget Linus Torvalds called security people m________ting monkeys. It seems very hard to discuss issues rationally lately without calling names that based on some a priori assumptions of the opposite side.

Re: Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software

#29

Post by tptacek »

eugenejen wrote: post #28
aaronsw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geez, that's a lot of ad hominem . Did I accidentally murder your dog or something? I wasn't saying anything about what 37signals does , I was criticizing what they recommended . You know, in their book. That I link to in my first paragraph.

No, he is testing Jason Calacanis's approach to PR. By attacking Aaron Swartz ad hominen, he raises his fame/notoriety in hacker community. Oh. I just forget Linus Torvalds called security people m________ting monkeys. It seems very hard to discuss issues rationally lately without calling names that based on some a priori assumptions of the opposite side.

He called OpenBSD people masturbating monkeys. He called security people whores. He actually had a sympathetic audience among many security pros for that statement. The whole thing is indeed a bit shady.

That doesn't make me any happier with my original comment, though.

Re: Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software

#30

Post by kul »

tptacek wrote: post #15
axod wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from 37signals though (Which isn't a good example IMHO - they have a rails 'fanbase'), what successful "Big release hollywood film" examples are there?

That's a good question. I'm having a slow day today; let me go look. If you don't see a response, I'll have conceded that there is no other good example of a successful "Hollywood" launch by a small startup. That would definitely hurt my argument. [edit: my slow day got fast, but I also did have trouble coming up with a clear-cut example of a small company glamour launch success.]

Paypal?
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