
Marketing Tricks for Web 2.0 - domp
http://www.nivi.com/blog/topic/marketing/
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BrandonM
"Hold some features back in your first release.

Release them next week or next month. This makes your customers think that you
are actively developing your product and that there is momentum behind your
product."

This statement really irks me, not just as a programmer, but as a consumer. I
initially thought the article might be a little joke, but since the other tips
were more reasonable, I have to assume that it is serious. I can understand
holding back features in your initial release, but there are much better
reasons than those that were cited. To purposely trick your potential users
seems to me to be a bad business model, and smells of the corporate mindset of
money and growth over all else. I think it is important to remember that the
whole point of developing a product is to fulfill a need (or want) of the
customer, and I think that as the average consumer gets more intelligent,
these types of tactics will be more transparent and will do more harm than
good to the startup.

As for better reasons for holding back features:

1\. In any interesting piece of software, I would imagine that there are
potentially hundreds of features which could be added. The difficult problem
is deciding when to be (temporarily) content with what you have and release.
Thus, some desired features must be left out in order to avoid the
perfectionist mindset, where nothing ever gets released.

2\. A mostly-implemented feature may work correctly most of the time, but fail
mysteriously at other times. Even with a beta release, it's probably best to
avoid these types of features which only serve to make your product less
reliable.

3\. A feature may be fully-implemented, but there may be no clear way to
integrate it into the UI. In this case, it would probably be best to hold off
and drop hints of the feature to beta testers, who could give their feedback
on how best to integrate it. After all, the feature is meant for the users to
actually use, isn't it?

4\. A feature may add computational complexity to the software which may be
overly taxing on the initial hardware that a startup company is using. Improve
the hardware before adding the feature, or better yet, improve the code which
implements the feature.

Am I being overly idealistic? Am I alone in thinking that the proposed
"marketing trick" is a bad idea?

