Why friends and family feedback sucks....
I initially tried to go to the people I already knew, friends, family, friends of friends, etc. This generally doesn't pan out for me too well. People seem to fall into one of three groups: First is the group of people that just plain have no idea what I do. These people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between my product and an IPhone, let alone understand how to help craft a message that will help sell my products or give me relevant feedback on pricing plans and UI layouts. It's nice to hear their encouragement at times if for no other reason than to hear that someone out there thinks I am smart (thanks great aunt Mildred...);
The second group that I've run into seems to fall into the camp of people that certainly have the aptitude to understand what it is I do, and likely have the ability to provide detailed, relevant feedback on everything I am doing. Many of these people could certainly be in my shoes running this company, building this software if they wanted to. Sure they like to hear about my experiences using .Net 4.0 and the new Parallel Extensions, or they are interested in hearing how the Quartz scheduler is working out for me. These people will even help me out by answering technical questions when I am in a pinch and would probably even write code for me if I begged hard enough. But they truly, just aren't all that interested in what I am doing. Sort of the same way that I could care less about Ruby on Rails or Adobe Air, but still talk tech with my friends who live and breath those things. For this group, I keep on plugging my product and hope that one day some of them will care enough to take an interest, but the best I get for now is a half hearted, short winded answer;
The final group that I'll put people in for the purposes of this conversation is people who think I'm just absolutely crazy for leaving a posh, high paying, "secure" job at Microsoft to follow some hair brained idea I have and spend all my savings for what they see as sure failure and financial disaster. Of course they are way too nice to say any of that, and also way to nice to provide any critical feedback so everything I ask of them is met with a polite answer of how good it looks or how well I am doing. The best I get out of them is a cup of coffee because they can't stand to see me spend my child's college fund at Starbucks. I guess that is worth something.
So where do I get useful feedback?
So in order to get good, constructive criticism on what I am doing and what I should be doing, I've taken to paying people for it. My company has become quite dependent on services like usertesting.com and utest.com for getting feedback on how things work and what people's impressions are of my products and marketing. It's nice to get this feedback from these places because it is unfiltered. These are people I never meet, likely never will meet, and all of their feedback is offline, meaning that they record it or write it up and send it to me. I've learned a lot and made a ton of changes based on the feedback I've received from these services. Someday soon I'll write up a separate review of those services. The one thing that the feedback I received from these services lacked for me was credibility. I find myself still wondering if a suggestion is the best thing to do and still have no one to bounce the ideas off. So I went in search of something more.
There are plenty of blogs, sites, podcasts, books, etc out there on software startups, and I read my fair share of them. There are a few however that played a part in helping me to take the plunge of quitting a high paying, "secure" job at Microsoft and spending my savings on running my own company. One book in particular is "The Web Startup Success Guide" by Bob Walsh. He has a great podcast and blog as well. Bob's writings really gave me a lot of the confidence that I could be successful and helped me to take the plunge. So when I found out that Bob has some consulting services where he provides website reviews and marketing type feedback and advice, I naturally decided to give it a try. For the money I don't think there is any better option out there. Bob provided me with candid feedback that was highly critical but was backed up with advice and thoughtful options for getting on the right track. Our working relationship started out on a Thursday morning as I sent Bob an email asking for a review. Within an hour Bob called me and we set the whole thing up. By the following morning I had a detailed, written review of my website and marketing message. We then had an almost 2 hour phone conversation the same day to follow that up during which he walked me through his comments, and went into much deeper detail as well as answered my questions and brainstormed some ideas. The time spent was well worth it and I came away with tons of actionable work items for improving my message as well as my overall site. If you're in need of some seriously constructive criticism of you product site and your message, you need to talk with Bob Walsh.
New Website and Open Public Beta
I've already finished implementing many of the suggestions that Bob gave me in this review, there are certainly more coming. The culmination of the majority of his guidance and critique can be seen now in the new Centripetal Software website that was recently published. There are still more items that will be done over time, but I'd really appreciate any feedback on the new site. In addition to publishing the new site, I've also been slaving away at new features within the Centripetal Retrieve™ application. The current release that was published a few days ago, opens up our beta to anyone wishing to participate, it is no longer a closed beta. If you are interested in controlling your data and files that you store in 37Signals Basecamp™ product then check out the Centripetal Retrieve™ for Basecamp™ product. While in beta we are not charging for the service. There are lots of new features getting added on a weekly basis also.
Thanks Mike for the kind words!
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