Friday, April 15, 2011

Snow Ball Effect



As a small company, our marketing budget is limited. We cannot compete with the big telcos and we can't come even close to Skype. We need to rely on our faithful users, on word of mouth and on a few lucky breaks. We got a few breaks when our competition crashed for a day or two. Every time there is a crash, our downloads go up significantly. Users are quick to find another solution when something goes wrong.

On the other hand, we need to make sure our own solution works perfectly. Our users are using Tribair on over 100 different types of Android phones. There is no way we can buy and test them all, but we are testing on the most popular ones. Even if Android should be standard, it isn't. As an example, we had major problems with the Galaxy from Samsung because it was bypassing Android to handle sound. Every time a user has a bad experience, he's not telling his friends about us. The snow ball doesn't get bigger. Even worse, he might make a bad review and the snow ball might actually get smaller.

On iPhone, we have finally fixed the echo problem. It will work on all iPhone and iPod 4, iPads and on iPhone 3 with iOS 4 or more. Even if it's simpler to test on iPhone, there are still a lot of different variations as they release new updates of their iOS frequently. As users are experiencing better and better calls, we can see their numbers getting bigger and bigger. But as soon as we make a bad release, their numbers drop instantaneously and it takes a very long time to get back up. A snowball is very hard to get rolling and very easy to break.

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