RWDevCon 2016 Inspiration Talk – The Power of Small by Cesare Rocchi

Advantage 3: Small Launch

Now let’s see the advantages of a small launch.

Imagine you had your idea. You designed it. You built it. You are ready to ship. But at some point one thought, especially if your app has some back end, this thought is going to hit you: “What if it doesn’t scale? What if some famous blogger talks about us and all the customers use our app and hog our servers?”

Have you ever heard something along the lines of this? Yeah.

A few observations.

1. It’s a very nice to have problem.
2. It’s probably not going to happen.
3. Instead of postponing the launch by 6 months because you’ve got to reword all the back end to scale it up, why not just soft launching to friends, to people you trust, to people that you have meet at some conference? Why not just soft launching to some people that drop their email address on the landing page? Why not just testing the ground and see how it goes, instead of getting in a tunnel that is 6 months long.

The Story of Buffer

Take Buffer for example.

They started with a simple landing page. Buffer if you don’t know is a service that allows you to schedule social media posts. They support Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and so on. They started just with Twitter. They started just with 1 web page that explained the product and they noticed that people clicked.

After a while they added a second page, fake, showing the pricing plans. It was fake and again people were clicking. Bottom line after 7 weeks they build a product just with Twitter and they had the first few paying customers. They did exactly that, start slow.

A small launch can help you in testing the ground, testing the code, testing the design, spotting bugs.

It’s not a new idea at all. Restaurants do soft openings every time to give the stuff a test for example and to spot issues in the menu, typos in the menu for example.

Have you ever watched the Ocean’s Thirteen? A few of you, okay. So no spoilers, but there’s a pretty good scene of a casino doing a soft opening in the movie.

Tips and Tricks

Now let’s see some tricks that you can exploit to stay small and focused.

The first one probably my preferred one is to set a time limit.

Think along the lines of will submit this app in 3 weeks with feature A, B, and C, and that’s it. Or let’s take big app, break it down in 6 milestones, and then finish just the first one and ship it to the store in 3 weeks.

Set a time limit because if you do that … Well, first of all, the end is in sight, so I got to get there and not somewhere unknown. You go with small steps. That helps the morale because you easily notice the progress day by day.

Set a limit on features. I’m sure any of us probably at some point in their career started with an app, big ideas, many features, I’m going to do everything, and then you end up struggling along the way, you are 40% done and you don’t even know if you’re ever going to finish the app.

Why not starting with fewer features? By the way, you don’t even know if all those features are relevant and valuable to your customers. So why not just starting with fewer features and maybe talking to your customers about those features? Much easier.

The third suggestion is break it down.

Try to break it down as much as possible. Now, I am a father, I have a family. I cannot afford anymore 10 hours of uninterrupted work a day. Although sometimes I think if I could have 3 good solid days, but I can’t. But I happen to have on the spot 20 minutes here and there.

Now if I carefully organize my to-do list with small actions easy to chew, then it’s great. What can I do in 20 minutes? Well,

There’s so many things that I can do in this on the spot 20 minutes that I happen to have.

Summing up here is the list of my suggestions.

Real World Example: Base Camp

Let’s see a few examples in the world of software. You probably are familiar with Basecamp.

They’re not a publicly traded company so they are not forced to share numbers at all. Pretty good place to be. But we can make an educated guess that they have around 10 million users.

Do you want to venture and answer to the question how many people are working at Basecamp? 50. That’s CEO, CTO, designers, developers, janitors, everybody. 50 people doing everything.

There’s a lot of advantages in this situation. They’re also bootstrapped. First of all, they’ve been able to grow the company culture slowly. No revolutions. Also that means that people tend to leave the company less often.

Also they are careful in hiring because you know in this case hiring means cutting a part of your check every month to pay someone else to work for the company. But it’s been working great for them so far because they’ve been around for 12 or 13 years as far as I remember.

Real World Example: Quip

Another example is Quip.

This is a VC funded company in the Valley so they have money, but probably they don’t spend it on developers because they have an app that is compatible with the Mac, Windows, Linux, Android tablets, iPhone, iPad, Apple watch. And it’s just 13 people, including CEO and CTO which probably are not going to code every single day.

They have a small team, tight-knit, super effective communication and they are forced to prioritize. This is the result and it’s great.

Real World Example: Desk PM

There’s also solo developers. Have you ever heard of the app Desk PM?

It’s made by John Saddington. Just one guy. He won the Apple award 2 years in a row. It’s a blogging application. I’m sure I can say there’s no shortage of blogging applications in the App Store and yet he’s been so successful.

Now when you’re solo, again, there are advantages. Like you can choose your own pace. It took John 13 years to build the app.

You can experiment and you can decide where do you want to go. Also, how to reinvest your income. For example, there’s a pretty famous blog post in which he describes how he dropped either 9 or 10k as sponsorship on Daring Fireball and it was totally worth it.