Or, “Time to fess up, we missed our launch date. Here’s why”.
I hate launching things late for two primary reasons:
- It undermines the trust our fans put in us. When we say we’ll do something and we don’t, it speaks to our character as developers, businesspersons and people.
- It’s such a cliché in the software world. Heck, in pretty much any product-oriented industry missing dates is almost expected. We like to consider ourselves better than that, and would loved to have bucked that trend.
So on behalf of the HFF crew, I want to extend an apology for missing our promised “submit to Apple” date.
So what happened?
Development is pretty well wrapped-up for what we originally set out to do. The primary reason we missed our date is due to what I call the “iTunes App Store Launch Day Heebie-Jeebies”.
It is incredibly important to us to make a good first impression, and we’re doing everything in our power to make sure each and every one of our users has a fantastic experience. This isn’t just good software-making, it’s good business.
First impressions are everything
We are doing everything in our power to make sure HFF is successful. We want it to make money, we want to reach out to as many users as possible, and we want those users to just gush and gush about how much they love HFF.
In a recent taptaptap blog post, they cited the importance of having a good launch. Indeed, all of the sales charts I’ve seen around the web always spike at launch and then dwindle down over time. This is very different than the tried and true web 2.0 approach of “launch early and often”, meaning you can rev a web site quickly and gain customers over time as word of mouth builds and google rank increases.
Indeed, the iconfactory learned “an expensive lesson” about what can happen if you miss your launch entirely.
In order to secure a successful launch, we plan on getting the application in the hands of reviewers and customers, and making sure they have a wonderful experience.
Here, File File! is a bit different
However, HFF isn’t the simplest of iPhone applications. It requires some setup in order to get going. The fact that it requires an OS X application in order to function makes it something of an anomaly on the App Store. Because of this, we have to do our very best to make sure the set up for new users is as smooth as possible.
We’ve been hard at work lately making sure the messaging is consistent and clear, providing a way for users to easily get help if they are having issues, providing more concise prompts within the application should a user run into roadblocks.
Here, File File is a powerful app. In fact we believe it’ll be one of the most powerful and useful apps you’ll have on your iPhone or iPod Touch. We want to make sure that using it is simple and graceful, and that you’ll come back and give us a wonderful review on the App Store.
