What if good enough was actually enough?

I went lately to one of Eric Ries's leanstartup seminar, in Paris.

Very inspiring and thoughtful as expected. Some of it reminded me of Balzac's "The Unknown Masterpiece": an artist, never satisfied with what he considers his life's masterpiece, keeps on amending it during years. When half mad he finally shows it to a friend, the poor fellow has to face the lamest doodle ever.

The Unknown masterpiece is amongst the most famous novel challenging the sense and the meaning of Arts.

Now, transpose it to IT. Especially to innovative IT. You know, those products and services that have and will undoubtedly change the way we work, the way we communicate, our relationship to others etc.

- Craiglist: the most popular online classified ad site in the US ? The poorest UI and functionnalities we've ever seen = 20 million people visit the site each month, viewing and self-publishing more than 17 million ads and forum posts (check this Wired story)

- Twitter: a limited number of caracters to tell everyone non-sense all day long =
and the list goes on like that.

Now I've been recently talking to a bunch of startup-ers and, as so funnily illustrated by Ries, they're all of them more or less stuck with existential issues of the kind:
- my product/service isn't ready - I must add features
- I have to delay the launch
- How can I raise interest (not mentioning money) with semi-finished product?
- I need 10 extra genius-developers to finish it
...

Basically those guys are changing the way we will buy on the Internet, travel, manage our inbox, manage and animate our community, and obvisouly invent a new way for us to do so.

How on earth could the know how we - users- will react to it?

Well they can't.

Ries best advice remain: try, fail, ask your users, correct, try again...


As one of those happy "early adopters" of those new services I'd love to say:
1 - Don't forget that we -the users - have, first of all, to understand your product
2 - Need support to use them
3 - would love to exchange with you on our experience
4- would then, and only then, love to have more features :-)

The Early Adopter Manifesto - Curiosity kill the... product

"If they can't install our product, they don't deserve it"
"The hell with dummy users"
"Refesh. Re-install. Re-launch.Drop it."
"Try ssh."
"Does your id appear in the dropbox?"


Grrrrrr.

How is it that the brightest engineers produce the smartest and most helpful products and don't give a damn about end users?

How is it that WE, adventurous early adopter users when not beta users do not get the best support?
Aren't we the fuel of any disrupting innovative product success?

I know for sure that engineers, developers, sales rep, marketing people are key to your success.
But believe me (and so many others): you should take the highest care of your users!

So here's what we want from you bright guys:
1 - answer our questions
2- if you can't say by when you will
3 - if you still can't when you said you will: explain!
4 - assist us
5 - help us use your prowerful brain offspring
6 - tell us you care
7 - mean it when doing so

Hey! I feel a bit better! I didn't solve my twitterfeed problem though :-(

Special thanks to www.wordle.net (Warning: this is very addictive)