Back in 2003 we built a tool to help manage our business. At the time we thought that it was just something for us and that it wasn't good enough for the rest of the world. New employees kept telling us that it was one of the best tools they had seen for doing those things. But we were humble and didn't do anything with it other than use it internally.
Since then I have realized that many successful products have been launched with bare-bone features and mediocre capabilities… and excellent marketing. Sometimes products are sold before they are even built.
I read an article (blog post) about what it's like working at Google. One of the big things that sticks is that they celebrate product launches. They also are willing to launch bare-bones systems and improve them over time.
Well, over the past year we have been working on an updated version of our internal tool. It's an update in the sense that a car is an update from a bicycle. It does so much more and it's going to do even more in the future. It's really going to be a tool to help businesses focus on many of the core pieces necessary for running a business. But I'll save the details for our public launch.
Next week we are launching the tool for internal use. Eat our own dog food and make the product better.
We are going to make a much bigger deal about it this time around. Celebrate the product launch.
More importantly than that, we are taking it to market. Sure there is lots to do yet on the business planning side and on the product side, but that is how products evolve.
Building software products begins with the first steps and is only successful when you launch the product (release).
And we'll continue to celebrate our successes as we reach milestones, overcome obstacles and launch new releases.
When you are in the software business, nothing beats the excitement of product launch day.
