As Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Graylock Partners fame says: “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
While we publicly launched The Frontier, a screencast series for professional developers, last week, we actually did a customer pilot program first, for the month of December. This enabled us to launch 1 month earlier, by partnering with our earliest customers.
Why partnering with your earliest customers is critical during a launch
1) We knew our existing customers knew us best and would tell us the truth.
The Frontier is a complementary product for us at Big Nerd Ranch. We are well known for our bootcamps, team training, and consulting work, but we saw a need: once developers went through our training or read our books, there were advanced questions — beyond the frameworks, related to everyday usage, small exercises to add on to the topics we cover, that our students were asking for. We didn’t have to look far to tell, it adds up in our forums and from the feedback in the post-class labs and questions. We decided to meet our customers in a way that was perfect for that type of learning: screencasts.
Our customers know our quality requirements. We don’t half-ass anything. So they’ll know if we’re pushing the limit. And they’ll tell us. One caveat, though is that because many love everything we do, and can look past things that new customers might not — they might not be as forthcoming and critical and must be directly asked. One way we did is through a detailed survey that asked about specific attributes, instead of asking open-ended, leading questions:
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2) We could experiment very quickly
With our customer pilot program, we could experiment quickly and roll out changes very fast and let them know. One quick piece of feedback we got right away was that we were not offering any trial or free videos, so we rolled that out in a few days. In fact, what we did was move even quicker. When we got the first response: “Do you have any way for me to preview the screencasts?” We quickly turned around, published them somewhere else and sent them the links. Personally, via email. Could we have done this with a public launch? Probably not. Then within a few days we had 2 screencasts ear-marked and live on the site as free trial, and updated our conversion metrics to see if that helped convert. It did.
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The same thing occurred with a feature for automatically keeping track of which screencasts our subscribers already viewed. We did it very quickly, in a phased approach — in fact it was done so quickly that the first version showed which ones were watched with a little dot in the top right corner, but someone asked again the next day, so we quickly implemented a more prominent visual icon to represent it. And we could get this feedback instantly from our customers in this pilot.
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3) We could do things that don’t scale first, like ask for personal feedback
For everyone that signed up, we emailed to say thanks, and asked why they signed up, and what they thought. For everyone who hit unsubscribe or cancelled their subscription, we asked why, too. For everyone who even signed up for step 1, but didn’t finish putting in their credit card to complete the subscription, we had a personalized email to find out why — this is great for figuring out if we aren’t telling our value proposition right.
“To Scale, Do Things that Don’t Scale” — Reid Hoffman, in interview with Brian Chesky of AirBNB in Masters of Scale.
A customer pilot program enabled us to launch quickly, get feedback rapidly, and ask directly (personally!) our best customers what to build. It enabled us to get their direct feedback, often without the use of “scalable” things like a support portal, ticket portal, and just asking directly.