Sometimes It's OK to Curse in a Promo Code...
...But not this time. Also, a great example of a product launch.
Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going?
I was thinking this week about my first job out of college, where I worked for my alma mater in their external communications (er… “news and information”) office. I walked in one morning as the news broke that the Unabomber received a degree from our fine institution. That day was a shitstorm that - at 23 - seemed kinda fun. “What else,” I thought to my naive young self, “could happen at a university that would be a bigger deal than this?”
Obviously I was wrong about that. And I never expected a university president to be the first person to be fired for public display of gobbledy. Live and learn.
Once Upon a Product Launch
Let’s say for a moment that you are running marketing at a software company. Congrats. (If your dream is to run product marketing at a software company, you are free to pretend to have that job for the sake of this conversation. Unless you have that job already, in which case congrats again.)
Your product team invites you to a meeting and informs you that they have created a new product, and they would like you to market that product for them. Because you work in marketing.
You now have a few choices to make.
I’m a first principles kinda guy, so I do like to go back to the first week of marketing class and think about the 4 P’s (product, price, promotion, and place) - if you’re going to roll out a new product, you can choose from any of those P’s as a way to bring the product to market.
In software, typically new product rollouts focus on one of two things, either:
-Product functionality: what does the thing do that you couldn’t do before. And that’s fine - you can certainly do that and nobody will fire you for that.*
(*I don’t mean you won’t get fired - c’mon, you’re in software marketing. You just won’t get fired for that.)
-Price. “We now have a free version of XYZ.”
Yet, arguably the two of the three most successful software marketing launches were based on “place” - where or how is the product distributed.
Microsoft (not exactly legally) bundled Internet Explorer into its Windows operating system. Perhaps there were product benefits of using IE instead of a different browser, but its success was based on distributing it for free within the nearly ubiquitous Windows operating system.
Salesforce took a product that was typically sold as an on-premise piece of software and moved it to the cloud, creating the SaaS category. The product was distributed through a website instead of through an on-premise application.
(ChatGPT is the 3rd of the most successful product launches, and someone will write a book soon enough about how that happened, and I’m skipping over it because it doesn’t fit my point and I write this thing and that’s my prerogative.)
Since Salesforce, we haven’t seen place/distribution used much in the product launch toolbox.
Which is why I was so fascinated by Basecamp owner 37signals’ launch announcement for its new product called Once.
I would tell you what Once does, except the announcement very specifically does not mention that.
The product launch announcement DOES NOT TELL YOU WHAT THE PRODUCT DOES.
(In case that wasn’t clear.)
What the announcement does do is tell you that Once will be sold as on-premise software and not as SaaS. And speaks at length about why that matters.
It’s worth reading the entire announcement, but here’s a representative section:
Today, most software is a service. Not owned, but rented. Buying it enters you into a perpetual landlord–tenant agreement. Every month you pay for essentially the same thing you had last month. And if you stop paying, the software stops working. Boom, you’re evicted.
For nearly two decades, the SaaS model benefitted landlords handsomely. With routine prayers — and payers — to the Church of Recurring Revenue, valuations shot to the moon on the backs of businesses subscribed at luxury prices for commodity services they had little control over.
Add up your SaaS subscriptions last year. You should own that shit by now.
In other words, they’re arguing that the SaaS model benefits software companies, not software buyers.
I’ve written about 37signals before (specifically about Basecamp’s amazing website), and one of the reasons they’re able to be amazing is that their positioning is so, so clear. In fact, it’s basically on their website:
I’d suggest that their non-product announcement, which is really just a great press release that very much resonates with their target market, isn’t a product announcement, but an amazing piece of brand marketing. To wit:
“…valuations shot to the moon on the backs of businesses…”
Those fat cat founders made fortunes off YOUR monthly fees!
They stand with the underdogs.
As I yammer about repeatedly here, everything is positioning. Even fake product announcements.
I Just Need to Know…
What is the talk track for this Gartner slide?
Box O’ Crap
If you’re of a certain age (that age is probably 35), you lived through what I called the “Monthly Box of Crap” (MBoC) era of the internet.
The first era of the internet was the Non-MBoC Era (1996-2010), where you could order almost anything you wanted, and it would get to you in a couple of days.
Then came the MBoC era (2010-2020), when if there were a type of product you wanted, you could say, “I don’t care what you send me, just send me 6 of them in a box and have every podcast give me a promo code for 3 free months.”
We can thank beauty stuff MBoC company Birchbox for kicking off this transfer of venture capital dollars into the hands of Millennials.
(Here’s how MBoCs worked from a financial perspective: Raise $25 million. Spend $25 million on marketing to generate $10 million in revenue. Tell VCs the proof of concept worked. Raise $50 more million. Spend $50 million to generate $20 million in revenue. Tell VCs you doubled your revenue in just a year. Raise $200 million. Etc.)
Birchbox was super inspirational, and led to roughly 73,000 MBoC companies, and I can think of 2 of them that had an exit:
Dollar Shave Club (MBoC for razors), which wasn’t exactly an MBoC - it was a “get a razor every month or two” rather than “here’s 6 different shaving supplies.” They sold the business to Unilever for $1 billion in 2016 (Unilever sold the business to a private equity group 2 months ago). Great exit for the founder. Lesson: sell your startup to the old school company that’s afraid of missing out on digital.
Barkbox (now called Bark), which sells MBoC for pets and raised $281 million. Market cap is now $143 million. Lesson: Going public can be a great way to light $138 million on fire.
In short, MBoCs were easy to start, basically impossible to scale profitably, and all-but-disappeared after the funding dried up.
I say “all-but” because a handful of these companies have (somehow?) succeeded (or “succeeded”). One of those companies is called FabFitFun.
FabFitFun is an MBoC for “beauty, fitness and lifestyle” stuff, which is a lot of skin creams, blankets, and this device that definitely looks like a sex toy, except there are 3 thingies sticking out at the end and I don’t know how that would work:
So I’m not going to crap on FabFitFun, because they’ve created a pretty nice brand for themselves that’s been strong enough to survive the MBoC aboxalypse (har har). Let’s take a look at how they’ve managed to thrive. It’s actually quite simple:
Step 1: Define your position. They’re a wellness lifestyle brand that’s all about making women feel good about themselves by getting a little surprise box of wellness goodies each month. Great - that’s a big market!
Step 2: Grow by aligning yourself with influencers and other brands that espouse similar values. Lots of those on TikTok, right? That doesn’t sound crazy, does it?
Step 3: Run an ad on Twitter when other companies have stopped running ads because its owner says insane anti-semitic garbage, and declare how you support free speech and will spend $100,000 on ads on Twitter to show just how much you support its “free speech ideals” and also use promo code GOFUCKYOURSELF to get a free gift, because that’s super funny since that’s what Twitter’s owner said to advertisers when suggesting they left Twitter because of some anti-semitic garbage spewed by the owner.
Step 4: Have your co-founder apologize: “I know the team thought that it could be so outrageous that it could go viral. But I also think it was off brand for us—and not in a good, boundary pushing kind of way.”
Hm. I actually agree with that.
I’d say that as a rule of thumb, maybe - in any context - don’t use GOFUCKYOURSELF as a promo code. Unless you meant GO FUCKY OURSELF, which is totally OK.
I’m always happy to chat - here’s my Calendly link. (It’s free!) If you want some feedback on something you’re working on, or want to tell me what you think the analyst says when they present that Gartner slide I’m available. And of course I do work with companies to make their messaging clearer. I’m not going to turn down a chance to do that (obviously).
Or you can just respond to this email - I get those messages too. Thanks for making it to the end :)