Stitch – Launching New Products – The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same

Ed: Im sure Stitch could be interesting if their website actually spelled out what the product is. Their site mumbles something about realtime photos and story telling and has a very nice looking app on it, but is not really clear what the App does or who they built it for.

I’m not that bright and I have the attention span of a gnat, so if your product pitch and website doesn’t concisely tell me what problem you are solving, who has that problem, how you are solving it and why its better than the competition, I lose interest pretty quickly.

Oh just realised I just described most of the internet.

Sadly Stitch wastes most of the landing page talking about a VIP program and offering prizes to VIP users.

It’s not clear what benefit a user actually gets from the product, much less a VIP user. My guess is that their signup list will be full of non customers (the radio industry calls them Prize Pigs) who have no interest in the product just looking for a free prize.

But what I do I know?

Maybe the all expenses paid trip and the 12 offers of $1000 per week for the users that drive the highest referrals is cheaper promotion than any other method. Might turn out to be a decent investment to buy traffic to get some users on the app and test it out, but its sure to be misleading feedback and the users will be extremely random.

Once upon a time (actually only late last year) when you wanted to launch a product you needed to convince a journalist in Techcrunch or Mashable to take an interest in your startup and write a story and then you would have 100s of thousands of visitors crash your servers and then spend the next year wondering why this wasn’t turning into a raging success.

However it seems to me that getting your first 10,000 visitors is not the difficult job that it once was.

Since late 2014 when Producthunt launched and democratised product launches you can get 10,000-20,000 new users to your site in a few days for a half decent product, they removed the friction and gatekeepers from the product discovery process.

So Producthunt has made the initial launch a lot easier, but the biggest issue is the same as it ever was.

Getting the right users to arrive, bring their friends and continue using your product are still the biggest issues a startup faces.

Check out this data from Andrew Chen in his essay New Data Shows Losing 80% of Users is Normal.

Who is the right user? That’s up to you and why you built the product, but it shouldn’t be the whole world and I bet its not someone who is chasing a prize.

The lesson from this pitch is to focus your energies on selling the product vision and the benefit your product provides to the target user rather than focus on a random launch strategy.

PS. Even if the Stitch pitch is average, they are hinting at a real trend in the convergence/identification of real time events based on geo-located photos, video (Periscope/Meerkat) and tweets, check this cool demo out http://demo.thecitybeat.org/