The other day my friend Jonathan Perrelli (JP), Founding Partner at DC’s Fortify VC, tweeted that he was able to avoid some traffic by using the iPhone app for maps & navigation Waze. I’d been hearing about Waze on This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte but just had never downloaded it.
After hearing about JP’s experiences, I knew I needed to give the app a shot. I’ve now used Waze quite a bit. I’m really impressed. Some of the gamification and crowd sourced stuff they’re doing is really cool.
The experience underlined a principle that having a great product user experience is the foundation of all great marketing. Users need to be able to easily get into your product and see how it’s going to improve their lives. If you fulfill your product’s promise and do it in an extraordinary way then people will talk about you and you’ll naturally get more users.
It’s not good enough to just be good. You have to be extraordinary. The world will start talking about how you’re solving a problem in a new & novel way.
Marketing shouldn’t be manufacturing excitement. They should be amplifying the excitement from the people that are already using it.
There are a lot of entrenched players in the mapping & navigation space. To be a new entrant in the space is kinda crazy. What Waze is doing is different, interesting, and worth trying.
What kind of products have you been getting excited about?
Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's blog 