From 37 Signals’ Getting Real:
People often spend too much time up front trying to solve problems they don’t even have yet. Don’t. Heck, we launched Basecamp without the ability to bill customers! Since the product billed in monthly cycles, we knew we had a 30-day gap to figure it out. We used that time to solve more urgent problems and then, after launch, we tackled billing. It worked out fine (and it forced us into a simple solution without unnecessary bells and whistles).
Not sure I would have thought of that strategy myself. Or had the courage to follow through if I did…
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In my good ole telco days, that was pretty common. On one particular product, the changes to the billing system were so intrusive that we told the marketing department that there was no way we could bill until 3 months after the planned introduction. They turned that into a 2 month free introduction period :)
The question is really how big a risk you are running. Adaption on most products is slow so if you miss the first billing cycle you are not missing a lot of revenue. Having the extra feature might result in more customers and more revenue down the road.
12/8/2007 @ 12:23 pm