We've come a long way from the first days of FanPulse, starting from Joe and I building the foosball table. Yes, the foosball table was the foundation of our entire company, setting the mood and proof of how fast and solid we could build something so that we could start playing with it ourselves.
I haven't blogged the last few weeks about our progress because it plainly drained me enough every day such that I had no motivation to just sit and blog, instead I sat and coded. We have huge news, our iPhone application has launched to the public in the Apple App Store as of last Thursday. See the blog post about it here. That day was really exciting. For the next couple days it was almost all building hype, which included spamming the crap out of our friends, borderline begging people to join us in watching the SuperBowl, and also presenting opportunities to sport bloggers to be featured as our news content provider for certain teams.
Building hype is important beyond anything you could possible do in a startup. Not just in volume of hype, but the method of going about it. At no time do you want to ever build the type of hype that creates expectations for exceeding your ability, but that doesn't mean even the simplest of applications can't have a lot of excitement surrounding it. Play off of the fundamentals of your app, what already works and works great. Talk about what these simple actions can do for the users. Make users feel like they will become even more awesome after engaging in the 2 or 3 actions of your product. Most importantly, don't promise anything that doesn't exist or hasn't been built yet. Build hype about the present, be proud about what you have now. The emphasis should be all about what's going on with your product today, and how it's currently making people's lives that much better. Never make excuses for things your app might lack, or needs improvement on. Make it sound like we purposely made everything the way it is (which should be true anyway). Give people confidence in the product without making it sound like a scam.
It's huge to be confident in your own product. That alone will increase the quality in the eyes of users. If you're somewhat timid about making a fool of yourself, then that means you're truly not proud of the product and that's a bad sign. If you're not proud, then you shouldn't have even released something. Startups all understand that first revs, and every revision after is nowhere near the final goal of taking over the world, but knowing that goes a long way. You see the qualities of what you have now, and it really shows when you pitch the idea to customers, investors, and beyond.
Avoiding criticism by making excuses is a huge turnoff. Take criticism as suggestion and a learning experience, don't try to guess what people might hate or not like. If you're stern enough, people will start seeing things your way, and the most passionate and well thought out suggestions will come up. And of course, you'll get a bunch of random criticism that all stems from people trying to use your product in a different way than designed. This probably means the messaging for what your app is really about was not clear enough. There are exceptions where people are just looking for yet another hardcore "scoreboard" app for example, which we aren't. If you read even a single paragraph of text, you'll understand this, but some will not and miss the point completely. Hey, that's totally fine, but there's always room for improvement to make even the laziest users understand what's happening. Once that's good, you can hook anybody.
Every release and big event for your product is a huge learning opportunity. Build like a madman, hype it up like no other, piss people off, make people scream with joy, listen and learn, then do it all over again.
We were lucky in many ways, biggest being the SuperBowl event. We saw a huge number of people check-in and shout about the game. Once your friends are all on the app, it's actually really awesome while the game is going on. The need for more cross platform solutions became even more apparent as a lot of our friends were sitting around not being able to join in. We're pushing forward on our desktop and mobile web version of the application immediately. We have a shell page for games already in the works: http://fanpul.se/games/133633 This will be good news for non-iPhone users, and people who just like playing with things on their laptops and desktop computers as well. We'll get everyone's friends on this soon!
Time to get back to work! More updates soon.
