9 Tips to Narrow the Gap Between the Audience and the Developer
I’ve been thinking about TwitKit a lot lately. Not just about the software itself - more about how it came to its success. Marketing was a big part of how it gained success so quickly - I’d like to share my actions with you. They’re not really that intuitive, but if you follow them closely, it will improve your overall appearance to end-users.
- Show yourself. No, not a picture of yourself (although that does help). Show that there’s someone behind the product - someone that’s working hard to make the users happy.
- Be a member of your audience. Participate in conversations. If someone blogs about your product, comment on the post. Don’t just leave a quick thank-you with a link to the product’s page.. write a thoughtful and lengthy comment about the post. Try not to be too critical, but show that you read and thought about what the author wrote.
- Watch your community. No, not just casually - watch it like a hawk. Aside from watching for blog posts, track your product’s name on Twitter. (I do this by subscribing to a Twitter Search RSS feed for ‘twitkit’.) You’d be surprised how often people talk about products on Twitter.
- Treat everyone equally. That guy who donated $5 to your project? He should be treated just the same as any other user. You can thank him in some way for donating, yes, but in the end he is just the same as the other users.
- Be open to suggestions. I constantly see people talking (especially on Twitter) about what they don’t like about my product. I keep a list of the common things that are mentioned, and I try to implement them as soon as possible.
- It isn’t about the money. It’s about the users. Many non-free applications treat their users badly - they just want the money. It is all about the users. Listen intently to what they have to say, and you will be graciously repaid.
- Your product isn’t perfect. If you’re watching your community, you will definitely notice that some people don’t like your product. No matter how mean they are, treat it like constructive criticism. Contact them via Twitter, a blog comment, or email (however they originally made the comment) and ask them more about their dislike of the product. This relates to #5 - eventually they will explain exactly why they don’t like the product.
- Use it. The best way to put yourself into the community is to actually use your own product. Who knows, you might discover some bugs or think of new features!
- Be nice. This is the most obvious one, I think - but it still needs to be followed. I’ve seen a few developers who have gotten really angry and/or irrational when their product was insulted. Take this as criticism instead - see #7. Once you establish a presence on the Internets, your product will become a reflection of you. Make it a good one.
So, to sum this up: Make sure your users know you exist. Be part of its community. Take every comment about your product as constructive criticism. Respect your users.
POOF.
(I think I’ll make that my blog post signature from now on. muahaha.)
TwitKit - How It All Started
I’ve been wanting to write this post for quite a while - I’ve just never sat down and actually done it. So, here we go.
As TwitKit surpasses 6.1 thousand downloads, I keep wondering how this got started. I’m amazed at how this software has taken off - how much publicity and praise it has earned in the past months.
TwitKit was born in late April 2008, in the wordpress-chat IRC channel. It was Guy Lewin and I, casually talking. I had been using the Tweetbar extension in Firefox for quite a while - I had been constantly looking for a good Linux Twitter client (as my main computer runs Linux). Tweetbar was the closest thing I could find to a good-quality client, and it satisfied my tweeting needs for a week or two. But soon, I grew impatient and took a look at Tweetbar’s source. I had never developed a Firefox extension before, but it seemed simple enough - just some JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
So I talked to Guy about it, and he seemed to like the idea of branching Tweetbar into a new project. We talked about it for a bit, and eventually he came up with the name ‘TwitKit.’
We instantly got excited - the name sounded really good, and Guy quickly checked that it wasn’t already used. I hastily registered @twitkit and went to bed soon after.
The next morning, I could be found hacking away, adding features and improving some of the already-existing features in the extension. Soon after checking with the GPL 2 License (which Tweetbar used) I redistributed the modified version of the extension in a very unofficial manner. I sent the file out to a few people over IM, and they seemed to like it, so I also made a post on my old blog.
I’m not sure when I had the idea to actually formalize the extension - but I figured I should do it just to get it done. I quickly coded a nice, simplistic site for TwitKit - simplicity one of its core virtues - and published it. I put up the ‘1.0 beta’ version for download, and it slowly chugged along.
I got a few die-hard supporters in the first month, and for them I am ever grateful. I don’t know how I was lucky enough for some of these people to be bloggers - they spread the word on Twitter and their own sites about this upcoming Twitter app.
Soon after the first beta (a few days, actually) I released a second beta that fixed a large amount of bugs I had carelessly overlooked in the first beta. I gained about 100 downloads this time, and this really excited me. I jumped right into the development of the final 1.0 version, ready to go.
But somewhere during the development, I lost a little faith in TwitKit. I’m not sure what happened, but something just made me back away from TwitKit for a little while. I wasn’t sure where I was going with this - I looked at the many other available Twitter apps and just felt depressed about making yet another one.
I would work on TwitKit about twice a week, occasionally changing things in the source code and making enhancements.
At around the beginning of June 2008 I started to get interested in TwitKit again. Things changed, and I was back on track. I submitted TwitKit to the Mozilla Add-ons site somewhere near June 10th, and patiently waited for it to be accepted.
Well, I got very impatient here. After about a week I decided to publish TwitKit on my own, and then switch over to Mozilla Add-ons once it had been approved. When TwitKit 1.0 was released, visits to the product’s site increased by over 1000 percent. I was astonished at the attention it got - this was so much more than I expected. Soon enough we passed 3000 downloads, and we kept the pace going, passing 4000 soon after. The TwitKit community grew at an explosive rate, so exponentially that I wasn’t sure if I could keep up with it.
About a week ago, Guy Lewin asked if he could join TwitKit’s development team. I had kind of been pretending that it was a ‘team’ up to that time - there were two other developers, but neither of them were active. I gladly accepted his offer, and soon enough we were happily working together. The pace of TwitKit’s development increased almost two fold, and both of us were enjoying it.
And that’s where the unfinished story ends. There will certainly be more to learn, just not yet. We (yes, it’s a real team now!) have some great new features set up for TwitKit 1.1 - many more additions than we had in TwitKit 1.0. I’m very excited for this next release, whose date is yet to be decided.
Let me just say one more thing before you go… I am ever so grateful for all that I have received and earned since TwitKit was started. This is a billion times more attention than what I expected TwitKit to get, and I will never be able to stop saying ‘thank you’ for all the help you, and the rest of the TwitKit community, has given me. Every download and every visit to TwitKit’s site makes me so happy - I just can’t explain it. This has been a heart-touching experience for me, and I hope it will continue.
Thank you.
"CurVer Day" - Keeping In Sync With Your Software's Audience
I used to have a big problem with revision control. I would have released a new version of my product about a month ago, and have made massive changes since then. I, the main developer, would love my product, because I had fine-tuned it since that previous release. But I always forgot about how the users were stuck using the month-old version, just thinking that it was a mediocre piece of software.
To fix this habit I get into all the time (and I’m sure that other developers get into) I’m starting a new thing called CurVer Day. This is by no means a public event - I’d just like to share it with you, so it might improve your development habits as it will improve mine.
CurVer Day (Current-Version Day) will occur on the first day of each month. On this day, I will download the latest release - NOT the current development release, but what everyone else is using - and use it normally for the day. Not only will this help me have the same user experience as my audience - it will also remind me of features that I forgot to implement just after it was released.
Hopefully this will improve my habits (and maybe yours) and narrow the gap between the developer and the user much more.
Changing it up.
I really haven’t behaved when it comes to blogging. I’ve had an on-and-off relationship with the whole ‘writing’ thing - about every other week I feel like writing a blog post. Now, that’s not good, because (in my opinion) to sustain a blog it requires more commitment - wanting to post, at the very least, every week.
A few months ago I decided that because blogging just wasn’t too addictive for me, that I wouldn’t have a blog. This was after I created a Twitter account, so I had the idea that if I wanted to tell the world about something, I would write it on Twitter.
That worked for a little while - but every now and then I had a really awesome idea for blogging that I couldn’t fit in 140 characters. I went back into the on-off situation, which was the wrong choice - I intermittently blogged on wordpress.com.
So, I’m going to challenge myself, since I know it’s difficult for me to keep blogging in the front of my mind. I’m going to write on this blog (not sure why I’m using Tumblr, but meh) at least once a week, and see how that goes.
Advice For The Young At Heart
A young friend of mine was complaining about how older freelance web designers seem to talk down to younger freelance web designers because of their age and relative inexperience. I gave him this advice:
My advice to you is to believe in yourself, and be brutally honest with yourself about your abilities and your limitations.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can’t do something, because only you can be the judge of that.
If you ever happen to hit a wall because of your relative inexperience, learn from it, and don’t make the same mistake in the future. Marc Andreessen was 17 when Netscape became a multi-million dollar company. Filo and Wang were in college when Yahoo! made it big.
Listen to everyone’s advice, young, old or middle-aged; everyone’s got some truth to share or experience to pass on. Use your own internal BS filter to separate the useful nuggets from the useless crap.
Be humble. No one likes an arrogant smart ass, no matter what age he or she is.
Here endeth the lecture. (Steps off soap box)
Oh, I need a website to run WordPress?
- <CPTflconX> is it too hard to use the wordpress.org program?
- <hansengel> Not at all.. it's just the initial uploading of files that has problems for some people
- <hansengel> Everything else is a breeze, because WordPress is only as complex as you want it to be
- <CPTflconX> That´s what I had problems on
- <CPTflconX> could you teach me?
- <hansengel> errr, it's different for every hosting platform. What hosting service are you using?
- <CPTflconX> :S
- <CPTflconX> no idea
- <CPTflconX> lmao
- <hansengel> Where did you sign up for hosting?
- <CPTflconX> I didn´t
- <rmccue> There's your problem.
