Beautifully explained, PP, and you are spot on. Any product in creation, whether software, inventions, books, big pharma meds, music… if you don’t hold it close to the vest, you risk losing it altogether. There’s always somebody with enough manpower to take your not-yet-released product and beat you to the punch, grabbing the market share out from under you.
Software is tricky, especially serious software. There is no such thing as a small change, or a small addition. Every feature has to be tested, and every combination of features, in different orders. You can’t just click the button and say, “That works!” You have to try every possible combination that you think a user might try, and then try all of the most illogical combinations that nobody would ever be expected to try, except that they do.
Beta testers need to put on the biggest dunce hat they can muster, and pretend that they don’t understand anything about the software, and then make sure that the documentation or built in help features cover every single function in the simplest possible way.
That’s tough for the team who knows the software inside and out, to step back as a user looking at it for the first time. All of these steps take time, and should not be rushed because bugs will bite hard in that first marketing rush.
And the one thing you can bet big money on is that negative software reviews will come faster than positive ones. Happy people rarely share the joy publicly. They just use the product quietly and nobody knows they exist. Unhappy people blast their opinions out there loud and long. And competitors go out of their way to insert unhappy people into your business. That’s the norm in our society. So bug testing is mission critical, and user-friendly testing is mission critical, because you don’t want to give them ammo. You want to wow them.
The key to success isn’t just in the product, its features, or its price. It’s marketing. The worst product in the world can become the most popular through marketing, and the best product can wither away and disappear.
So they need to get the marketing plan geared up for a big blast off on day one and week one. That takes time, too. There’s a lot of pieces to put in place.
And if you tell people what you’re doing before it’s officially released, and somebody steals your marketing train, you’ve lost momentum.
If they can release a software product with more features at a lower price point than the competition, at least as an introduction, they could send it to the moon. If they can release quality software in a niche that isn’t yet saturated, same thing. Just one alluring feature that the competition doesn’t offer can put you in that niche. So I’d fully expect them to guard their secrets right up to the day of launch.
I read tea leaves. Keeping my teacup full.
