

Marketing A Physical Product Like A Web App (WhiteyBoard on Wired) - jasonwilk
http://thehopkinsonreport.com/2010/06/17/episode-109-can-you-market-a-physical-product-like-an-online-product-interview-with-whiteyboard-com/

======
rjett
Here's my quick review of the whiteyboard:

After seeing the techcrunch review climb the HN front page a couple months
back, I convinced my office to buy two of the 4' x 6' Berthas. I left the
actual ordering up to my office manager. Five days after ordering, we still
hadn't received our order so we called the folks at whiteyboard who told us
that they must have lost our order. So we ordered again, they apologized for
the inconvenience, and we were told it would be there within the week. A week
passed and still no whiteyboard. We called the whiteyboard guys and they told
us, sorry, but your order is stuck in customs. We apologize for the wait, but
we'll get your order to you as soon as possible. So about 3 weeks later, our
whiteyboards arrived. Drumroll please....

We put up the whiteyboard last week. There's a reason they don't show the
Bertha in their demo video. It took 3 of us to put that monster up. After we
got all the bubbles out, I wrote on it with the dry erase and tested her out.
Writing on a whiteyboard is, as you would expect, exactly the same as writing
on a white board. Next, I took the dry erase eraser to erase what I had just
written. This works ok, but not as well as a regular white board. The dry
erase smudges a lot more on the whiteyboard and you're left with a tint of
whatever color you had just written in. A slightly dampened paper towel takes
care of this though.

Each day I come in the office, the edges of the whiteyboard are slightly
peeled away and there are a few bubbles in the middle of it to iron out so
this can get a bit annoying, especially if there is stuff written on it that
you don't want to erase.

Aside from the ordering snafu, I would say that the folks at the office seem
to think the product is ok. Since I'm the youngest in the office, I have
jokingly been dubbed the "whiteyboard guy" so I get a lot of shit for all its
little quirks. My fallback retort is that we paid 10% of what a comparably
sized white board costs and it still gets the job done. And even though it
seems slightly ghetto at times, that's what matters, right?

------
mkramlich
They need to add a 4th product option: _her_ phone number.

