http://www.grid7.com/archives/96_faw-6-mitch-kapor-of-lotus-development.html Build something. BIGGER. Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:02:34 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0 http://www.grid7.com/archives/96_faw-6-mitch-kapor-of-lotus-development.html#comment-6004 Tue, 29 May 2007 17:29:14 +0000 http://www.grid7.com/archives/96_faw-6-mitch-kapor-of-lotus-development.html#comment-6004 [...] The Fog Creek co-founders both had programming backgrounds and feared they didn’t have the business experience to actually sell their product. The sought to structure a reseller arrangement like Lotus had done with Iris where they would do a 50/50 revenue share with the company that distributed their software. This idea fell flat with no takers. They tried offering a finder’s fee on the site for people that brought in sales and that too flopped. They dabbled with creating an affiliate program to pay a percentage commission on sales generated through in-bound links from other sites and, after a negligible amount of sales generated from that program, they canceled it out of annoyance from sending $19 commission checks. They tried timed coupon giveaways that expired within 72hrs and this too produced only marginal results. Spolsky says, “The one thing we learned over five years is that nothing works better than just improving your product. Every minute, every developer hour we spent on any one of these crazy things - although they had some marginal return on the work that we put into them - was nothing compared to just making a better version of the product and releasing it. If we had taken all the effort we put into these crazy schemes and put it into moving our software development schedule ahead by the equivalent amount, it would have paid off much more.” [...] […] The Fog Creek co-founders both had programming backgrounds and feared they didn’t have the business experience to actually sell their product. The sought to structure a reseller arrangement like Lotus had done with Iris where they would do a 50/50 revenue share with the company that distributed their software. This idea fell flat with no takers. They tried offering a finder’s fee on the site for people that brought in sales and that too flopped. They dabbled with creating an affiliate program to pay a percentage commission on sales generated through in-bound links from other sites and, after a negligible amount of sales generated from that program, they canceled it out of annoyance from sending $19 commission checks. They tried timed coupon giveaways that expired within 72hrs and this too produced only marginal results. Spolsky says, “The one thing we learned over five years is that nothing works better than just improving your product. Every minute, every developer hour we spent on any one of these crazy things - although they had some marginal return on the work that we put into them - was nothing compared to just making a better version of the product and releasing it. If we had taken all the effort we put into these crazy schemes and put it into moving our software development schedule ahead by the equivalent amount, it would have paid off much more.” […]

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