CulturedCode is going to make a ton of money next week
And I’m glad.
Things is launching at next week at MacWorld, and my predection is that they are going to make a killing. I wanted to note a few reasons why, outside of the fact that it’s a really great app.
- The Cult: GTD, David Allen, and the rabid cult behind them are now well past phenominon and fast creeping into the task workflow of people outside of geeky industries. Building a good GTD app and launching it now is good, opportunistic timing. You can’t ride a wave too early or too late. You need to hit the crest just right. I think these guys did it.
- The long-ass public beta: I’ve been hearing about “Things” for what feels like forever. In fact, the public alpha was released just a touch over a year ago. For a relatively small, very well focused app with a talented design and development team, a year is a really long development cycle. But while the journey from alpha to RC1 was long, it read like an epic, as the application gained critical acclaim and positive reviews from many seeking a GTD app. All the while, providing feedback to make the final, saleable product totally rock. I’m pretty curious how exactly CulturedCode managed their feedback loop, what they did to prioritize feedback against their own roadmap.
- Dealing crack: ok, you’re going to need to stay with me here. You build an app that caters to a reasonably large (and growing) audience’s need. You involve them in the development cycle, giving them the software for free as thanks for being an active part of the feedback loop. The users become dependent on the software not just because it’s software they need, but because it feels like their own. When you take the product out of beta and put it for sale, your conversion rate is going to be excruciatingly high because they’re dependent, they are addicted. You’ve sold them crack, and while they could go to another dealer, many won’t. Some due to loyalty, but mostly, they’re hooked on your stuff and don’t remember how to function without it. It’s how I feel about things like the Web Developer toolbar and Firebug. Sure, I lived before they existed, but I’ve blocked out all of those awful memories. They could charge for those tools tomorrow and I’d pay without thinking, and I barely ever write code anymore.
- Charging for Paraphanalia: Again with the drug metaphors. Glad you’re still with me.Not having a good iPhone app for your productivity software would be a travesty, especially since the iPhone somehow lacks a to-do list natively (wtf?). CulturedCode COULD have given this software away for free. That would have hooked even more people, right? Maybe. But wait, they’re giving away their primary product for free too, right? Not really, in this case, “free” is temporary. So you’re addicted to a really great “free” app, and a really good companion app is only $10? Well sure, I’m in for that. Do you see what happened there?A “free” app turned into a $60 total sale. That’s smart. Charging for the iPhone app showed that they were serious, something that a lot of developers forget to do now and again. It’s important, because it’s really difficult to take a product seriously when it’s not well supported, and you’re crazy to think you’re going to support a product alone for its entire lifecycle without making any loot from it.I add the caveat alone because someone’s going to bash me in the comments saying that “open source software often has better support…” blah blah blah. I know it does. But rarely from the project’s originator. So I’m sticking to my guns here.Back to my point, adding money to the equation is a measure of commitment and seriousness from both sides of the equation: it says that the developer values their own time and work and plan to continue working on the application and it says that the customer isn’t just casually interested, but is invested the value this application provides them.
- Let’s not forget, it’s a great product: All of the marketing in the world can’t make a shitty product awesome. If your product is good, it sells itself. CulturedCode did a great job of everything from blogging about the product revisions, behaving like a human being (actually, a team of human beings) rather than a company on twitter (I bet they wish that co-tweet had been around, it’s perfect for their use). But most of all, they built a product that their users wanted to talk about, and gave them points of reference (blog, forum, twitter, full featured beta software) to do their buzz-bulding for them. They threw a really great cocktail party.
At the Eye of the Storm
Jason, Dave, and I had a conversation at the end of the day today at IndyHall (where I’d estimate nearly 1/3rd to 1/2 of our regulars utilize Things) about the price point. I’m a firm believer in setting a price and sticking to it, but I have to think that without all of the smart moves I listed above, that $50 price tag would scare quite a few people away.
CulturedCode COULD have run a more traditional development cycle, still come out with a decent app, and charged $25 for the desktop and $10 for the iPhone companion (maybe a $30 combo deal?), put some cash into traditional marketing, and it would have flown off the shelf and into the hands of every man, woman, and child who needed to get their shit together.
But they didn’t.
They built a great app, spent a year actively working with their customers-to-be, and are going to sell the daylights out of it at $50 a click.
Well done, CulturedCode. If you have any interest, I’d love to speak with you and write up a more formal case study about slow-marketing your application. I’m very impressed.
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Excuse me, waiter, there's a starfish in my Chinese food.
A new food->coworking metaphor just showed up in my feed reader. New York Times food reporter Jennier 8. Lee gave the presentation above at Taste32008 conference, a partner program to the TED event.
Jennifer runs through some history of the Americanization of Chinese food, particularly dishes like General Tso’s Chicken and Chop Suey. She then goes on to share her exploration of “regionalized” Chinese food, and how there are variations on every continent of the planet. The common thread across all of the continents is that while their versions of Chinese food are barely recognizable as Chinese food to the Chinese, they are recognizable from region to region!
Bear with me, I am going somewhere with this.
What’s fascinating about the non-chinese Chinese food is that there’s a great deal of consistancy across the world, from menus, to restaurant naming (how many China Gardens could there possibly be in Philadelphia?) to decor.
And yet, there’s no Chinese Restaurant HQ.
Unlike the restaurant chains, which invest years in branding and menu development to ensure careful consistency across their locations, the Chinese food industry seems to be a phenomenon of starfish organization.
What does you’re region taste like?
You might imagine the smile on my face widen while watching this video, as near the end Jennifer mentions a derivitive of the Egg Roll that, you guessed it, has a Philly cheese steak inside. Originating in the city of brotherly love, the cheese steak egg roll has traveled to other regions of the US, usually by hand of someone who moved from Philadelphia to another city.
Coworking: the Chinese food of the workplace
Cooking dinner for yourself is great but it gets old, so periodically you order takeout. You’ve got a favorite chinese food restaurant in your neighborhood. You may have tried a few other local spots, but this one has just the right flavor you like (and bonus, they deliver for free). When you travel to another city, and have a craving for…you guessed it, Chinese food, you won’t have to ask too many people to find out their favorite spot, and have a pretty good chance of it feeling…and tasting…just like that spot at home. They may not know your name when you walk in the door, but the familiarity is there all the same.
OR
Working from home is great but it gets old, so periodically you like to get a change of scenary, so you hit up your local coworking spot (be it an office, for more formal coworking, or a cafe with some friends for a Jelly session). You’ve bounced around to most of the cafes, bookshops, and other coworking spaces and found the one that’s right for you (and bonus, they have free wifi). When you travel to another city, and need to get some work done, you won’t have to look much further thant he coworking wiki to find a local favorite spot, and have a pretty good chance of it feeling just like that spot at home. They may not know your name when you walk in the door, but the familiarity is there all the same.
What other lessons can Coworking learn from the decentralized empire of Chinese food restaurants?
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Authenticity isn't a feature. It's a tone.
You can’t add things like authenticity and transparency to your business or application as if they were ingredients to a soup or features on a car. When they are not a part of your DNA, they end up feeling robotic and artificial, which has the opposite of the intended effect. Applying these types of techniques is most valuable when you yourself can identify with the tone you are using.
It’s like going to the south and intentionally speaking with a southern drawl. You’re going to sound ridiculous and fake. If you grew up in the south and that inflection was part of your DNA, even the most jarring accents sound real and authentic.
There’s a movement towards applications and businesses communicating like people. I think this is a good thing, and so does Rands as he points out some examples of where, and why, we like it when an app or site talks to us like a person. This comes as a response to noticing the removal of the tagline “Loves You” from the Flickr logo.
Who knows who removed the authenticity from the Flickr logo. It’s sad, but it served its purpose. Flickr’s old logo was a quiet efficient invitation to join a community and sound like yourself.
via Rands In Repose: A Signature Cadence.
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playing devils advocate AGAINST single click signups
A verbatim conversation, copied right out of Adium, with Jesse about making it easy to sign up for a website.
Jesse: You know, I really love the simplicity of Posterous. I may start using it. Alex: its sllick Jesse: Yeah. The no signup is the best non-feature around. Jesse: Oh and they allow custom domains. Didn’t even realize that. Alex: mmm nice Alex: ive got a devils advocate argument about the “no signup necessary” workflow Alex: it plays into low-impact workflows, too, like openid/facebook logins Alex: clearly, you and i benefit Alex: but from a business standpoint, the ratio of dead accounts goes through the roof Alex: so you can report users as an astronomically high number Alex: but active users as a comparison looks bad, and on a business model, thats bothersome. Alex: not insurmountable Jesse: That’s very true. I do like how it gives me instant gratification but then allows me to come sign up.
discuss.
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A Roadmap for Community Organization and Mobilization – Harvey Milk
“My name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you”.
That’s a war cry, if I ever heard one.
Over the weekend, I sat down to watch Milk, a documentary about the life story of Harvey Milk as the first openly gay public official.
The story of Harvey’s work for the gay rights movement is inspirational in itself. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be going into the details of that here since I really, really want people to go see the movie.
What I do want to mention is the importance of Harvey’s technique for tactically inspiring, motivating, organizing, and mobilizing a community to action and making things happen. I really think that four step process, in cycles, is a powerful technique and worth reflecting on. And that’s why we’re here, right?
1- Inspire
Harvey’s first step was to take a step at all. Given his groundbreaking goals, making any forward motion was inspiring in itself. He failed at being elected to office, and he failed more than once. His persistence and attitude attracted like-minded movers and shakers. Some of those movers and shakers came with momentum of their own. Others were movers and shakers with potential. Harvey wasn’t discriminating towards either. Anne Kronenberg had prior campaign experience, and was an organizer herself. Others, like Cleve Jones, had less experience with formal community mobilization but Harvey knew that he had potential, and more importantly, knew how and when to put Cleve in opportunities to show that potential.
As a community organizer, your first move to action is to not be alone. Inspire those around you, and gain some critical mass. From that critical mass, identify new blood to continue recruitment and spreading of the message.
2- Motivate
So you’ve got a critical mass. You’ve got well spoken, active, passionate partners in your mission. Don’t sit on that.
Be daring. Do the unexpected. In the movie, Harvey led an impromptu demonstration of thousands of gay residents of the Castro in San Francisco the night that Dade county ban on gays in schools was being voted on. He led them to the point of near riot, and then demonstrated his ability to take control of, and channel the energy of, the mob with little more than his voice. It was the aftermath of these actions that set off the chain reaction that Harvey needed to motivate the rest of his potential supporters into being supporters, and his existing support became even stronger as they watched the groundswell around them.
As a community organizer, your second action is to show people the tools, and then give them the tools. Every follower should look to you and say, “I can do that, too”. And then your response should be, “yes, of course you can”.
3- Organize
This is where Harvey really shone. His every action became tactical, utilizing the relationships he’d forged. But the key to his organization was a sub-point to organization, and that was delegation. He knew his strongest disciples, and when and where he could rely on them. As you’re organizing, take the “smallest pieces” approach. Take your goals and tasks and break them down until they are approachable and achievable, and then hand them out.
Here’s the kicker: by making sure that the goals you’re handing out are approachable and achievable, you’ve created situations where the people in your community that you’ve inspired and motivated have a chance to win. Once they feel that win, they’re quickly hungry for more, and come back ready to take what they learned from their first win and get that adrenaline rush again.
“But what if they fail?”. Good. That’s almost better than a win. Since you’ve broken these goals into such small pieces, they’ll fail quickly. They will learn lessons. And most importantly, others will learn those lessons as well.
As a community organizer, your third action is to organize, but not micromanage. Delegate goals. Reward success with new goals. Reward failure with education. There’s far more to be learned from failure than there is from success.
4- Mobilization
This is actually much simpler than most people think, especially if you’ve followed this far.
You’ve already got people circled around a common vision. You’ve already got people inspired, and inspiring one another. You’ve already got goals broken out, and organizationally set yourself up for a win (and an easy recovery from a loss).
Now go somewhere. All mobilization is, is taking your plan to action. Pick a point of reference, and have everyone focus on it at once. In a tactical sense, this is when all of the soldiers lock onto the same set of targets and pull their triggers at the same time.
As a community organizer, your fourth action is to provide a point of reference, and lock on. Fire when ready.
Repeat
Every time you think you’re done, that’s just an opportunity to repeat the cycle. The beautiful thing about this cycle is that each time it repeats itself, its impact is larger than the former time around. You’ve got more people who can inspire, motivate, organize, and mobilize. Each effort spun off only leads to more efforts that spin off. Communities grow so that they can fracture, and continue growing. That’s how communities work. It’s a good thing.
As a community organizer, your final action is to never have a final action. Do it again.
And that was how Harvey Milk got elected to public office.
And that was how Harvey Milk took on the John Briggs campaign.
And that was how Harvey Milk led a community to become a movement.
Photo Credit: UMass “Documenting Difference”
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