1. When is too soon to hype your product?

    Controlling the story

    I can’t remember where I heard this (probably on a TWIT Podcast), but someone once said that the reason Apple doesn’t announce products before they’re ready isn’t because they’re all insanely secretive control freaks, its that they don’t want to commit to a product release date before they can commit to a product release date. It might sound a bit circular, but most Apple announcements end with “… and you can get it today,” or, at very least, “… and you can get it in 2 weeks.”.

    Take, for example, the iPhone 4/Gizmodo stolen phone snafu. As Andy Ihnatko astutely points out, there was very little in the Gizmodo story that was of much surprise. The real issue, at least for me, is that the new iPhone was announced before Apple was ready for it to be announced. Apple didn’t get to control the story. Apple didn’t get to control the timing.

    And Apple didn’t get to give us the exact date that this great new whiz-bang device on which they’ve spend quite some time working will be released.

    But this post isn’t about Apple

    Yesterday I ran across a TechCruch article saying that Square was delaying mass roll out of their credit card scanner plugin for the iPhone and iPod touch. Announced a few weeks ago to much fanfare, the world has been eagerly awaiting this product that promises revolution but has yet to actually deliver on it. Jack Dorsey, one of the guys behind twitter, seems pretty comfortable with the prospect of over-promising and under-delivering.

    At the same time, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of an update to the new online task management system called Nirvana. A long time user of another online task management system called Toodledo, I’ve been looking very forward to checking out Nirvana, as it looks and feels a lot more like OmniFocus and Things than Toodledo.

    Nearly two weeks ago, the folks out at Nirvana posted a video on their blog outlining some of the new features. The original blog post says that “We’re working out the kinks this week and hope to have these changes rolled out soon.][0-12]. Whether or not that means “by the end of the week of June 7, further down in the comments one of the Nirvana-ers commits to “within a week” and yet another commits to “Saturday’ (aka June 19, or today). And as of 8:15pm CDT, they have yet to roll these new features out, at least to my account.

    The balance between transparency and certainty

    The obvious response to all of this is to say that you’re embracing transparency, that you want to keep your users/customers updated on what’s going on. But transparency is more than just saying things; the implied agreement in transparency is that the customers get to feed things back to the company and the company gets to respond. Transparency without sincerity and followthrough is little more than push marketing. Push marketing has its time and place, but let’s not confuse the two.

    But its really about the say/do ratio

    This post isn’t about a web startup who’s eyes are bigger than their stomach. This post is about being able to deliver on something when you say you’re going to deliver it. The easiest way to manage that, of course, is to only announce something after you’ve finished it. Many people criticize companies like Apple for keeping so many secrets. But if we look back at the recent history of Apple announcements, it seems clear that they place a high premium on their say/do ratio.

    Whether you’re a software startup or someone who works in an office, being able to keep that say/do ratio as close to 1.0 as possible directly impacts your credibility and the trust that people place in you. For something like Facebook, trust translates directly into how much data people post on your service and, consequently, how useful the service is to advertisers and other revenue sources. For the rest of us, its how much recognition we get, how many things we get tapped to do, and how much leeway we get when things do go wrong.

    I guess what I’m trying to say here is that if you have a product or a service, particularly one that depends on users placing an incredible amount of trust in you, you should really really work hard to do the things you say you’re going to do in the time you say you’re going to do them. Otherwise the loss of credibility could be disastrous for your burgeoning business.