Lessons learned from The Partner

I like lists. Here’s one from The Partner on his learnings from the last 168 days. To be honest – read this and you have a summary of the entire blog!

• You need to work with someone who compliments your skills and respect how they work. I absolutely could not have seen this through without Mark’s gumption, positivity, writing skills, web-knowhow and technical abilities.
• You need to start selling face to face, even if you ultimately want to sell it online – getting the right customers on board and using your app properly sets the right tone and allows you to build the right outbound marketing messages as you take the product forward.
• New tools like Skype, Google docs etc can save you a lot of money – especially if you are based in different countries.
• Mark and I met three times in person to build this product and it was plenty. I have never met The Designer or The Developer in person.
• Be as close as possible to your first customers. We have been visiting all our beta customers in person to get them set up and using it properly, and are having telephone conversations with our early triallists to ensure they are happy and gather their feedback. It’s fascinating and surprising what you learn from each and every one of them.
• Biggest lesson of all – don’t follow Jason’s advice on leaving a payment mechanism until later– start this straight away – we could have launched three weeks earlier if we had started this process at the beginning.
• If you don’t have a designer as one of the founders (and therefore get “free” time from that designer) it’s an expensive way to develop an app. Yes, it ultimately results in a nicer looking and feeling product but we have spent double what we originally anticipated on the design side.
• Testing never stops. Every small bug that arises and gets fixed has a knock on effect, retest the system end to end each time you fix something.
• Have as many people on your team who can write as possible. I am fortunate that (I think…) Mark and I can both write well. This is a point I heard Jason make in a speech a while back. Every task seems to be writing oriented – writing the app, writing the site, writing the alert emails the system will send, writing the welcome emails, writing the landing pages, describing the app, blogging about it, emailing contacts about it – the list is endless.
• Blogging/pre-buzz doesn’t always work in your favour – industrial espionage is rife online! We have had a few people ask for a preview only to find that they are actually digging for information for the competition!
• There will be moments of doubt and frustration all the way along –share the little victories between the founders to keep momentum.
• We suspect that we will find that building the app is the easy part. Spreading the word and getting people to buy the app is going to be the hard part. Despite case studies to the contrary, I don’t believe that there’s any such thing as an “overnight” success. The work of the coming year or two will be about getting the app adopted and then getting it referred on. We are finding with our beta customers that it’s making a genuine difference to their customer retention rates – we just need to keep delivering those results and keep promoting them.

As Semisonic beautifully sang in Closing Time, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end…” so as this build project closes, the selling project starts. We’ll keep you posted.