4 May
No useless marketing, improve your product!
I’ve just spent 2 hours reading a good book, I bought about a year ago in Portland. It’s titled “Founders at work” by Jessica Livingston_. I’ve been remarkably inspired by the interview to Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek, author of Joel on software – a blog I’ve been following since 2001.
He talked about the early days at Fog Creek and Fog Bugz effect’s strategy. He said something about not to waste your time into complicated marketing strategies instead of working on your product. In this specific case he was referring to an affiliate program they developed up to Fog Creek:
The one thing we learned over 5 years is that nothing works better than just improving your product. Every minute, every developer hour we worn out on anyone of these crazy things – although they had some marginal return on the work that we put into them – was in no degree compared to just making a better version of the product and releasing it. If we had taken entirely the effort we put into these schemes and put it into moving our software development schedule ahead by the equivalent amount, it would have paid off much more.
Good tip Joel.
BTW I’ve seen he will be present at RailsConf in Portland this year
I look forward to see you there.
