Wondering how to make your product launch a huge failure? Read on… [WARNING: IRONIC ARTICLE]
- Don’t worry about marketing, your product will go viral. A good product is enough, the word will spread automatically. Just develop it, put it online, and then wait. You will soon see thousands if not billions of sign ups.
- Just build your product without any upfront marketing research. Ideally, your product is not solving any pain or any problem, but is just a piece of code hosted on a server.
- Strive for the perfect product: put every pixel of your product on it’s perfect position before launching, go for a 100% test coverage, and refactor all of your code several times. Also, make sure you use all of the latest sexy web technologies everywhere you can, ideally without asking yourself if they add any value to your customers.
- Don’t charge any money for your product, and attract the cheap clients that want a lot from you, but don’t want to pay for it. Give it away for free, and don’t ask yourself how you will ever make money from it.
- Don’t blog about your product prior to go live! It might result in your blog or product name appearing in the search results of Google, which of course you absolutely want to avoid! Just build the product in silence, and don’t blog about topics that might interest potential users.
- Don’t build an audience on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn! Best is to hide away in silence. Be a black cat in a dark forrest, so by preference nobody will ever notice you.
- Please add tons of features: add settings, optional fields, graphs, ajax, … add every feature that will scare off someone that is looking for a simple solution. Simple solutions are no good.
- Go for the big markets like “online ERP software” or “general project management software”. Compete with Microsoft, Oracle, Groupon or 37signals!
- Spend a loooot of time on your logo, your company name, your domain name. Ideally in long brainstorm sessions and meetings. Don’t worry if your product actually solves any problem for any niche market, but optimise, finetuine and brainstorm for weeks (or months) about your logo, name and domain name!
- Try to reach everyone on this earth with your product. Don’t be specific. Keep it generic, and solve every single pain in this world with your huge product. Avoid narrowing down to any particular “niche” or subgroup of people in this world. Try to be the next Facebook. Aim high. You are not happy with a small tiny product that brings you 30K in monthly recurring revenue, right? A bubble of stock market shares and a worldwide user coverage, that’s what you should target!
Do you have any more recipes for the ideal product failure? Leave them in a comment!