1 post tagged “marketing”

Good Enough vs. Just Right

There's a huge dichotomy in the development world. No, not Object Oriented vs. Functional; not Java vs. C++; not Windows vs. Mac; not CSS vs. Tables. The dichotomy is between Good Enough and Just Right.

Good Enough is when your product is not fully functional, or lacks interesting features, and is really subpar, but it satisfies the demand and offers some core features that make it more desirable, atleast at first. Just Right, on the other hand, is when your product is overall a superb product, well designed, fully functional, lots of great features.

This distinction comes up all over the place: MySpace is Good Enough, Vox is Just Right; Windows is Good Enough, Mac OS is Just Right; etc. And we see who's won: Good Enough. But why? Why is it that people settle for something thats Good Enough when there's something that's Just Right? Perhaps it's timing; getting something to be Just Right takes extra time, extra effort, whereas getting it to be Good Enough means you get out onto the market sooner.

Good Enough is not Version 1.0

Now you might think, "Oh, so that means that in order for a product to be successful I need to make it in a rush." Well no, not exactly. Getting something out the door early is a good thing, yes. We see this all the time in the Web 2.0 world where products always seem to hit Beta real early. Paul Graham has noted in his essay on startups that releasing early is essential. Merlin Mann did an entire netcast, First Time Sex & the Beauty of 1.0, specifically about this idea.

But the big difference between Good Enough and Version 1.0 is that Good Enough is a final product. Contrastively, a Version 1.0 product is the first version of many, and it'll get better as time goes on. Good Enough ships with bugs, glitches, and problems, but works well enough to attract people. Version 1.0 is not necessarily feature laden but it's stable, and it works properly.

Beating Good Enough

Good Enough wins because it's first. It gets out there, attracts users, and holds onto them despite the eventual release of better stuff. People are too afraid to change. We all want to beat Good Enough, but sometimes it's hard to do when they're already entrenched. I've got some ideas though on how we can win.

1. One thing we can do is literally beat them to market with our products. Do as they say: Release early and release often. Get your product out there, get it known, and make sure that you never let it stagnate once you get people using it, lest it become Good Enough. But sometimes this isn't possible to do because there's something out there already that's Good Enough.
   
   
2. In that case, you need to make your product sufficiently better to make people see that things aren't so great where they are. Ruby on Rails makes development so much easier to do that it's pulling in PHP developers like crazy. Where it used to be hot to code PHP, now it's old fashioned. Ruby on Rails is the stuff of the future, or so it seems. But sometimes switching is just too hard.
   
   
3. Whether it's switching from Windows to Mac or from MySpace to anything else, it's a unpleasant process to have to go through. You could loose all of your data, things no longer work right, important programs aren't available; your social network is no longer accessible, your blog has to start from scratch, you have to redesign it to feel like your site again. Anything that can make this process simpler is a good thing.
   
   
4. Get known. I know it sounds like an obvious point to make, but really it has to be made. If you've got this great product that's better than your competition and easy to switch over to, then you need to make people aware of it. And this doesn't mean advertisement, no. This means let people play with it, show some people who are popular, get them to give it a try. If they like it, they'll talk about it and tell their friends. The only reason I know about Vox is because I heard Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur talk their their Vox accounts.

So...

Good Enough is our biggest enemy. We strive to create great products but we're often beaten by inferior products that seem to become popular for whatever reason. But with the right approach, we might be able to beat them, and create great products that succeed.