There are three main models for selling software. You can hire a direct sales force. You can spend a lot on marketing and advertising. You can let your users sell the software for you, a technique commonly known as viral marketing. There’s a catch with viral marketing – users have to like your software.
Flashback
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Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2005-12-16]
A look back at the best from a year ago.
Communication / Design / Prioritization / Product Management / Requirements / ROI / Software development / Usability / Writing
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Goal Driven Upgrades
Kathy Sierra writes (another) great article at Creating Passionate Users. This time, she talks about why users don’t upgrade and presents ways to get users to install the latest version. We focus in this article on one way in particular – using goal-driven documentation to encourage upgrading.
Product Management / Software development / Writing
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Goal-Driven Documentation
Why do we write documentation? Because someone told us to write it? Because our competitors have it? Or because we want our software to be easier to use? It should be the third one, but often, writing documentation is an afterthought, and it is deprioritized, and we just get it done, instead of thinking about the goals for doing it in the first place and doing it right.
Presentation / Product Management
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Extra Features Cause $245,000 Loss
Robin Lowry has posted a story of a demo gone horribly wrong at The Product Management View. In the story, users end up confused by the myriad of features of the software – resulting in a $5,000 sale instead of a $250,000 sale.
Usability / UX
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Getting Past The ‘Suck Threshold’
Kathy Sierra writes a great post in her blog, Creating Passionate Users, that talks about the requirement to make things interesting. The driving objective is to accelerate the user adoption curve – which Kathy calls the Kick Ass Curve. Any user is initially forced to focus on the tool, and […]