The Great Product Showdown Story
Keeping the Competitive Edge

What do you do when you have a disagreement amongst friends in a start-up? You put your guru reputation on the line and you duel it out, coder brawl. That’s how my co-founders and I decided to settle our little debate. Here’s my story.

The Valley

Let’s start by painting the mental perspective of a typical developer here. Living in Silicon Valley, is like living in a strange mix of science fiction meets old gold digging and wild west cowboys. We don’t herd cows, but we do wrangle code. We don’t dig for gold, but we do mine data. There’s a wild and untamed sense that the mother-load of payouts could be sitting anywhere. The environment supports this. Everybody gets it. Just down the street from my apartment is a community center for start-ups. We’re talking about a communal working (and sleeping) area for those who has to burn the midnight oil for a chance at the dream.

So that’s the mentality. Ideas are cheap, you prove it by doing it yourself.

Thing is, you’re not by your lonesome when you’re working in a start-up. My posse and I have been working our claim to fame for a year now. Our company, Appfluence (www.appfluence.com), have gradually built a rather loyal following to our product. We recently added another line to our product called Priority Matrix suite and managed to make a lot of people happy by giving them the long awaited Mac version that they’ve been asking for.

Now what?

A while before we decided to make our Mac version, we wanted to know: should we make a PC version? Windows? Web? Enterprise? VC? Suite? Android? We had a lot of questions! Answers aren’t short here in Silicon Valley either. There are many people that can tell you their experience, but how to make sense of the signals? Some questions we had for the near-term included: is it possible to lower our price model to $0.99? Is it better to diversify our product line by replicating our technology into other areas? Or do we stick with our current offering and continue to polish the user experience. If so, how?

So we sat, and we thought about it. Should we start pricing our software differently? I admit it; I’m in the business so that I can make money. Except that customers are expecting free, or freemium. Let me just say this now. The freemium model is damn hard to pull off. Just trying to give something away for free is hard. Spreading the word about yourself is hard. People have high expectations for paid apps, but even higher expectations for free app. Why? Because they expect it to be good and free, instead of just good.

So we’ve tried a few things, we at least have an idea of where the money is. Or do we? The good thing about having questions is at least you have ideas for things to look for. The problem with having questions is actually finding the answers.

The few (limited) resources we had were ingenuity, and time. We’re in it for the money, that’s the goal.

So I came up with an idea and presented it to the guys. I proposed that we settle our questions by doing a business competition. We would compete, internally. The idea was simple. We’d operate under our Appfluence flag and spend 1 month developing a product to test some questions. It was a bigger version of A/B testing. So we drew up some simple rules.

(http://www.appfluence.com/great_product_showdown)

Rules:

-Use any material resources you deem necessary

-1-month development, 30-days market measurement (from time of approval by Apple)

-30 days of free form marketing during the sales period
Only 20 hours of customer support (additional coding) is allowed after the development period

-Each hour beyond the 20 hours shall cost 1% of your point each

-In case of emergency, all parties will halt as agreed (determined by a polling panel)

-Withdrawal = automatic loss, still has to fulfil prize obligation

-No foul play

We used our the metrics from our other products to issue the scoring. Our goal was to have each and everyone of us learn how a product gets to a consumer and why. We understand it was difficult to do this while doing support and development for our flagship product at the same time, so we had to work it around our primary product.

After 1 month of development, this is my contest product:
Roger the Scapegoat (http://www.appfluence.com/roger_the_scapegoat)

Let’s see how it goes! Please help me win this competition. I really, really want the dinners and the bragging rights. However this may turn out, I am optimistic that we will have a better idea of how to grow our business. In a month, I will post the result of this little experiment on the product
page to share with everyone my experience from this.