Thursday, July 7, 2011

Just do it!


There's some bold wisdom in the Nike slogan. The other day I wrote about the temptation to keep honing and polishing a product before releasing it to the market. But it's important to take the plunge and start to get market feedback...

Well, I've taken my own medicine and am pleased that Starfish has launched in the UK and beyond. It's kind of fun to see the number of users increasing, and more plot points on the map as users create content.

And we are already gaining valuable feedback: I hadn't expected 10% of the first twenty users to forget their password on the first day! So we rapidly built and deployed a 'Forgot password' mechanism that we'd hoped to keep for later while we got on with more exciting functions. Trouble is, there's no point in having the exciting stuff if people can't get back in to use it so we had to re-prioritize. An important lesson about getting the basics right.

Meanwhile, we were able to release something exciting, too: users can import their own contact database and  privately visualize their contacts on the map, along with other more public information. Watch this space!
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