Be The Revolutionary Your Audience Can Deal With

I love the kind of evangelism that Dharmesh Shah, of HubSpot fame, broadcasts in his OnStartups blog. His post today is a classic one, “Wimps Wait, Revolutionaries Release Early”. His exhortation is to pump out your software as soon as you can, and that waiting until it is “perfect” is a mistake. I completely agree with that opinion when it is applied to web-based software where you are in direct control of the web server where the application is deployed.

Sure, there’s the fact that the end users might be inconvenienced by performance issues and they will have to deal with you rolling out features that are not ready for prime time, but you will be getting users and that’s what Dharmesh is talking about. But what kind of end users are we talking about? If the kind of software we’re talking about is desktop based and if it’s meant for business users, you are not involving just that end user anymore – there’s an entire IT infrastructure that will be getting involved either to prevent potential end users from downloading your software in the first place, to castigating your end users if your software causes them enough problems to have ot call up the IT staff. IT folks don’t want anything coming into their, wait for it, ecosystem that results in more calls to the IT desk.

Let’s say your target users are actual IT staff – ok, this is where you really have to be careful. No IT administrator is going to put your software into their live environment if it isn’t vetted. They should have staging servers to test out anything they are considering pushing into production. This can work out well for you even if your software is still in beta but has “good bones”. But the basics have to be there: your download process, licensing, and installation have to be solid because they know that’s what they will be dealing with when your software is ready. Let’s be realistic though, who knows of an IT department out there that isn’t underwater with service desk requests and an ongoing upgrade schedule. Your product had better be pretty good, and as revolutionary as Dharmesh suggests it should be. Then you’ll a much better chance of getting those covetted early users.