PeteSearch

Distribution, distribution, distribution

What location is for real estate, distribution is for businesses. This is something I learnt early in my career, when I was in the game industry. I couldn't understand why a truly terrible game that I worked on like F198 could sell two million copies, while some wonderful independent PC games languished. Why didn't they take over the world, since they were clearly superior?

What F198 had that they didn't was a major-league publisher, Sony/Psygnosis. And what the publisher added was distribution; they put the game on the shelf of thousands of shops around the world.

So why didn't those shops stock all those wonderful independent games? Because the shop's owners did not have the time or inclination to each search through all of the thousands of games out there to figure out which ones were fun, reliable, had a high marketing budget, and were likely to sell well. Instead, they effectively sub-contracted quality control to the publishers. Psygnosis had a lot to lose financially by promoting games that didn't sell, so the shops trusted them to be gatekeepers.

Distribution is about that chain of trust, where customers give shops they visit some trust to do part of their decision-making for them by weeding out bad products, and shops in turn chose suppliers, and then trust their judgement. The same process works with blogs; lifehacker readers rely on the editors to weed out the rubbish, and only present interesting products. In turn, the editors rely on a trusted set of sources to do some initial filtering for them, such as other blogs and social ranking sites.

What makes Facebook so interesting as an app platform is that they have a different distribution model; instead of being a global hierarchy, your friends act as the filters for you. It's a flat local network, and the recommendation comes from someone you know personally, rather than a trusted authority. It's hard and time-consuming for new companies to break into a distribution pyramid, because they have to persuade a whole chain of very busy people to spend time looking at their product before it is placed in front of a large audience. Facebook holds out the possibility of reaching a lot of people a lot faster.

How to promote your add-on - What not to do!

To echo Thomas Edison, I now know a thousand ways not to market an add-on.

Build it and they won't come

My initial marketing strategy was passive. I'm used to working in niche markets like video editing, where early-adopters actively seek out new products, and then evangelize them to a wider user-base. This is generally the pattern when the demand for solutions in a market is high, and the supply of software is low. I had a lot of success in the past just by making my software available, alerting a few contacts, and letting the users find me.

Add-ons are usually aimed at a consumer market. There's a lot more software competing for people's attention, and the problems solved are a lot less pressing. That makes it tougher to persuade people to make the first step of trying your add-on out. I didn't have a plan of how to overcome that hurdle, and so ended up with very few people giving it a try.

Blind to my baby's ugliness

After all the work I'd put in, I wanted to believe the add-on was obviously compelling. In reality, everyone's software is ugly in the early days. It's important to accept that it will have a lot of problems, people won't get it, and you'll need to explain your vision of how it will grow into something beautiful. Thanks to Dharmesh Shah for the metaphor.

On my visit to Chicago I read The Devil in the White City. There's a quote there from the architect Daniel Burnham:
"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized."
I should spend more time getting across the excitement I feel about what can be done with client-side mashups, there's some amazing possibilities, and this is just a first step down that road!

Pick a confusing name

I picked PeteSearch because its initial name of SearchMash was grabbed by Google after I launched my Java applet version, I'd had success with PetesPlugins in the video world,  and I couldn't think of a better one.

The name didn't advertise what the add-on does, and wasn't very intriguing. Most of the time, a bare name in a list is the first contact a potential user has with an add-on. That's all the information they have to decide whether to invest more time in it, so I should have made it tell a story. GoogleHotKeys is a much more effective title.

Don't track progress

There's no records on exactly how many users I have in total, how many of them have been referred from other sites or any breakdown of user feedback. I've been keeping track in an informal, qualitative way, by looking at my web-server stats and chatting to users, but there's no quantitative statistics. This is a problem because it makes it very hard to really judge what's working and what's not, and so to decide what the best use of my time is.

It doesn't have to be a big report, but it's incredibly helpful to keep track of a few key statistics like total downloads per day, and numbers of referrals from each source. I don't have a good process for doing this automatically yet, but I'll let you know how I get on.

Have unclear goals

I go into this in more depth below, but my fundamental mistake was not being clear about what problem I was solving. I wanted to keep my options open, and be able to experiment, but I ended up with so may features it was confusing both to use and describe.

More posts on add-on promotion.

How to promote your add-on - The Message

The previous two posts were about the mechanics of how to contact potential users of your add-on. I'm now going to cover a much fuzzier problem, how to persuade them to consider using it once you are in their field of view. This is an area I need to improve on for PeteSearch, so a lot of it will be practical examples of how I'm trying to change things to be more persuasive.

I met with Mrinal Desai over coffee last week. He's the chief evangelist for the wonderful Crossloop, and he's done an amazing job with the app. From being unknown less than a year ago, it's now got thousands of users all over the world almost entirely through blogs, digg, and other word-of-mouth marketing. They recently crossed the three million user-minutes mark! So, he's somebody whose advice I value.

He asked a pretty simple question; "What is PeteSearch for?" My immediate response was 'to make search better', but this didn't feel concrete enough, even to me. It reminded me of Guy Kawasaki's advice from The Art of the Start, to have a three word mantra that describes the difference you're trying to make to people's lives. Once you have that, it's the start of both a coherent, understandable marketing message, and a test for decisions you make about the product.

You may think you don't have a marketing message, but everything from the name of your add-on, to its description on distribution sites, to its home website, is material that people use to make a decision about using it. The fundamental question you need to answer is "What does it do for me?", how will it improve your potential user's life? Your answer to this should be your mantra, and everything else should build a convincing case to persuade a user that it does solve their problem.

As a practical example, PeteSearch is trying to improve search, but no user wakes up in the morning and thinks "I need improved search". Users have much more concrete gripes; "I wish I didn't get so many 404 links when I searched", "It's annoying to go back and forth between the search and result links all the time", "Why is the text summary so short?", "I wish I could use the keyboard to navigate through results, rather than the mouse". At the moment the add-on is trying to solve all these problems at once, and they're all equally prominent in the marketing.

This is a problem, because a single user is unlikely to have all these gripes at once, so most of what they read in the marketing is solutions to problems they don't have. Even a lot of the UI in the extension itself ends up being clutter. This attempt to solve everyone's problems actually ends up solving nobody's.

To fix this, I've decided my mantra will be "Better Search UI", and I will focus like a laser on adding great keyboard navigation to Google. This will make describing it a lot simpler. I'm even considering a name change to GoogleHotKeys, to make it a lot clearer to potential users what's in it for them.

PeteSearch may be unusual, many add-ons are built with a much clearer, specific need in mind, but if you're struggling with a your site or description, I found starting with a mantra really helped me to improve my message.

More posts on add-on promotion.

How to promote your add-on - Distribution

Getting your extension distributed on sites such as addons.mozilla.org or Windows Marketplace will help you find an audience in several ways.

Discovery. People who are interested in finding new add-ons browse these sites. You'll be in front of an audience of early-adopters who are interested in experimenting. This can be very powerful if you're trying to solve a problem that applies to a lot of people, rather than a more niche issue. Most people won't invest the time to try your plugin unless it's offering a solution to a specific and painful problem, but this audience is curious and more willing to take a chance.

Legitimacy. Nobody's heard of you. Unless you're a big company or celebrity, or you're targeting a niche audience in an area where you are well-known, you're a stranger who wants to install software on their computer. This sets a very high trust barrier to overcome! Distribution sites effectively lend their sponsor's reputation to your add-on, making people feel comfortable installing the add-on because they know the sponsor has a lot to lose if they do distribute something malicious. To protect their reputation, the sites generally have a vetting process to check add-ons before they're allowed on the site.

Promotion. Distribution sites exist to show off all the cool extensions that exist, and are generally set up by the creators of the main app. Having a good collection of add-ons is an important selling point for the browsers, and so some extensions are included in their established marketing efforts. If your add-on gets picked as a great example, and prominently featured in their marketing, you'll reach a lot of people. This will usually happen after you're an established add-on, with proof that you appeal to a large audience already, so don't make any plans that rely on this, but it's a great bonus if it does happen.

So, getting on a distribution site is a good idea. How do you do it? For PeteSearch, I've only made it onto the Firefox site so far, so I'll focus on that process, but I'll be attempting to get the IE conversion up on Windows Marketplace soon, I'll cover the practicalities of their vetting process once I have.

To get started with Firefox, go to their addons site and register as a new user. Once you're registered, you can then upload the extension you've created. You'll need to provide information about it, and some basic checking will be done when you upload the file, to make sure it supports the correct versions of Firefox for example. Once you've got it uploaded, you then chose to make it publicly visible. This places it into the sandbox, which is a sort of purgatory for plugins, where they wait to be approved. They are only visible to people who create mozilla accounts, and change their account options to make sandbox add-ons appear. The idea is to distribute the approval process by getting reviews from people who browse the sandbox, so that the final mozilla reviewers have something to base a decision on. In practice, very few add-ons receive reviews in the sandbox, I'm assuming because very few people are browsing it.

Since an add-on with no reviews will be rejected if you nominate it for the public site, this can be a problem. For PeteSearch, I was able to work around this by gathering links to all of the external reviews, and including them with my developer notes, after it was rejected the first time.

More posts on add-on promotion.

How to promote your add-on - External Blogs

So, you've written an IE or Firefox extension. Now, you need to tell people about it! In this new series, I'll be covering what I've learnt going through that process.

External blogs. A lot of my users have come from four main-stream blogs who I contacted directly about PeteSearch; John Batelle's SearchBlog, Gary Price's ResourceShelf, WebWorkerDaily and Hackszine, but I've also had some good traffic from blogs who discovered it themselves, like Pete Prestino's, BrainsFeed and NetWizz.

I would recommend finding authors who've written about the problem you're trying to solve, and emailing them, or leaving a comment on a relevant article. Invest some time on their site, try to contribute to their community, and get a feel for the readership's needs. Be very respectful of their time, they are all dealing with a lot of unsolicited emails, so be clear and concise on what your extension offers. That way they can quickly decide if it's something their readers may be interested in.

Don't be offended if you don't hear back, expect the majority of your attempts to reach out to have no response. If they do reply, or post on their site, make sure that you thank them with an email!

Treasure any feedback you get, especially the negative. Remember, almost all people will silently stop using your addon if there's a problem with it, so someone who tells you why it sucks is doing you a big favor!

More posts on add-on promotion.