Seth Godin’s book ‘All Marketers Tell Stories’ inspired me to share what I’ve learnt in 30 years of the software business.
Software companies often find themselves stranded on islands of excellence, serving a small group of customers but unable to grow. Opportunistic sales result in a few more islands from time to time.
It’s depressing to see companies with excellent technology shipwrecked. A love-hate relationship with marketing is often a contributory reason. We love having many qualified leads, but hate getting our hands dirty with marketing.
Why’s marketing hated like this? In my experience the cause is often the developer background of many managers. Developers equate lead generation with advertising. And developers hate advertising even more than marketing!
The Clang compiler recovers from unknown tokens using a spell-checker. Something small can be remarkable and worth spreading.
Being remarkable doesn’t always mean you have to develop something large. Sometimes remarkable is small, as this Clang example seen today on Hacker News demonstrates very nicely.
Clang is an open-source compiler front-end for C, C++ and Objective C. The project builds on the LLVM compiler back-end with the goal of replacing the GCC tool chain. Their worldview accepts that programmers can and do make mistakes. Amazing feats of Clang Error Recovery shows how they’ve woven this worldview into the compiler.
What caught my eye was how Clang recovers from unknown tokens. Instead of unhelpful error messages (like GCC), the Clang team chose to do something remarkable: they added a spell-checker to guess what you mean:
Software protection schemes annoy customers and don’t stop real pirates. Better to have a remarkable product and a story to spread.
So, it only took 2 days to hack the Apple iPad. Trusting DRM to work was unrealistic on Apple’s part. Even so, we in the B2B software business have our own blind spot when it comes to software protection.
Each of the software products I’ve worked on has included a protection system. Sometimes a hardware dongle, but more commonly software-based schemes linking the software licence to the customer’s hardware configuration.
We were scared customers wouldn’t pay if they didn’t have to. With licence fees starting at $10K for each developer seat, hundreds of thousands were at stake.
You can’t spread your own story, just create a fertile environment, weave your story, give it its freedom and wish it a world of luck.
Stories are your best chance of getting your message to the people you need to hear it. Even so, the right story told to the right people is no guarantee your story will spread. You need 5 ducks in a row to have a chance of spreading:
Selling to developers who hate tools is a quick way to waste lots of money. We targeted the few whose worldview embraced tools.
As application tool vendors we convinced prospects with metrics and ROI. Adopting tools, we thought, was a no-brainer. Even so, selling to developers who didn’t want to use tools was difficult. Time and again developers successfully blocked tool adoption.
Our problem: their worldview didn’t include the idea tools are useful. Our solution: we focused on the 1 or 2 developers whose existing worldview did include a positive attitude towards tools.
Whether or not these developers had formal authority, we got our tool into their hands so they could reach their own conclusions. If they thought our tools worthy, they’d start spreading the word internally. Having someone who developers trust spread our story for us made all the difference.
