Laserlike

If you have ever worked with a sales team, you know that most salespeople fulfill demand rather than create demand.  Product managers of new products in large organizations are continuously frustrated by this fact, but the reality is that, from an ROI perspective, the best return on sales effort is finding existing demand.

You can learn something about selling & marketing from this behavior.  Whenever possible, fulfill demand rather than creat demand — a simple way to do this is to ride the current news cycle.  Even large, wealthy, powerful companies learn that they are much better off playing to current trends in the market rather than trying to create new ones.  Innovate on your product, but leverage existing news trends for your marketing.

I will provide three examples here and would love to hear from you about others.

1.  Yuil.  Sam Pullara from Yahoo! wanted to show people just how easy it was to use Yahoo’s BOSS to create a new search engine.  He played on the massive hype cycle around Cuil and created a site with the look and feel of the site which he called Yuil.  The site, with minor UI changes, is now 4hoursearch because that’s how long it took Sam to build the product.  Sam’s objective wasn’t to belittle Cuil, but rather to ride the hype cycle around Cuil’s launch to make a point — Yahoo! BOSS is easy and powerful.  Within hours of my Yuil post on Laserlike, I had a few thousand people visit the site.  So I rode Sam’s news cycle which was driven by his riding the Cuil hype.  Think about what would have happened had Sam started with the name and 4hoursearch.  Nobody would have paid attention.  

2. American Idol Prediction Market.  Prediction markets have awesome potential to help us assemble distributed knowledge.  The problem is that, despite many efforts, they haven’t taken off to date.  In a short experiment, I worked on a project while I was at Yahoo! with John Hayes to build a simple one page prediction market.  Unfortunately, you cannot see much now, but the idea was that we could run an experimental prediction market that coincided with the 2007 season of American Idol.  The results were amazingly accurate and we no doubt benefited from riding the American Idol wave of news with each week’s drama around the voting.  

3.  Dropbox.  While this is a subtle example, it is worth taking note.  Drew Houston put together this screen-cast to articulate what it is he’s trying to do with his product.  While he did a demo that showed off the features, he made the video run and played off of current events.  Watch the video to see for yourself.  The response was overwhelming, in part because of the pure entertainment value of the video (I quite enjoyed the Microsoft-Yahoo! M&A example Drew used).