Thinking about product messaging for our own startup, by looking back at the first iPhone reviews. What can we learn about launching new products and services from Apple?
All this in honour of my dear iPhone 3G, whose days are surely numbered.
When the first iPhone launched, we really hadn’t seen much like it. A touch screen interface back when touch-screens were largely unusable. The full internet on a phone, not something hobbled like WAP.
As a founder constantly iterating Somewhere’s product messaging, I wanted to see what lines I could draw from that original iPhone launch to our own products. What can I learn about launching a new product, leading with a new message (it’s not a phone, it’s an internet device which can make calls too) and how can I apply that to my own company (it’s not a CV, we don’t care for job titles, this is a representation of how you think about work)?
Here are my thoughts from a thoroughly enjoyable few hours reading some of the original iPhone reviews.
Let’s start with this weirdly url’d review from The Guardian. They split their thoughts over multiple days, and the linked review focused on the design, the fact that multitouch really worked, the idea that a virtual, on-screen keyboard was usable, and the missing features (no picture SMS, no SMSing multiple people).
Reading it back, I’m immediately reminded of the genius of “slide to unlock”. The general consensus at the time was that touch-screen technology and virtual keyboards were a risk. So much of the early hands-on reviews focused on how well those two things performed, but the “slide to unlock” feature seemed at first magical, and then obvious. Sure you could unlock your phone with a button, but sliding to unlock seems like an innocent invitation to the world of gesture inputs.
It’s not hard to look at that moment and immediately draw lines to your own product. What’s the simplest, stripped back version of your product that can act as that initial breadcrumb on the trail? Can you initiate someone in the language of your product before they even know it?
Over on engadget, they praised the product for its design, were happy to see that the phone worked in direct sunlight, complained about fingerprints and also about missing features they too were expecting to see.
More interestingly, they included a paragraph about the three sensors — light, orientation and proximity. Orientation was noted as getting confused from time to time, and that still happens, but in the main, those sensors formed a large part of the experience. They combined to create the magic of a keyboard-less, touchscreen smartphone, and at launch they surely had to work near-perfectly.
“The proximity sensor, which prevents you from accidentally interacting with the screen while the iPhone is pressed against your ear, switches off the display at about 0.75-inches away; the screen switches back on after you pull away about an inch. This very useful automatic process took a little getting used to from us oldschool touchscreen users, who have long since grown accustomed to diligently turning off the screen while on a call, or holding our smartphones to our ear ever so gently.”
In terms of a product launch, maybe skipping a few of the “must have” features is ok so long as you back that up with some new features that seem innovative but really should have been there all along. No MMS versus a touchscreen phones that makes you disable the screen while on a call? It’s a clear balance between the features and the user, or, as Geoffrey Moore would put it, core vs. context.
Taking a step back and looking for the bumps in the road can pay dividends. I do this all the time — looking at LinkedIn, a 12 year old product from another time, and comparing that to Somewhere, asking ourselves, what’s expected of our product that we don’t think should be there at all? It’s hard not to come away feeling like LinkedIn is the Flash of our ecosystem.
Back to engadget, and their review of the stock apps is interesting. These days we’re starting to tire of default apps on our phones that we can’t get rid of. They’re the “made for Windows” stickers that Apple laptops wouldn’t dare to include. Perhaps there’s a formula here, though? If you provide sufficient utility and mix it with enough magic, then you can be forgiven some missing features and junk. And, if you understand your market well enough then you’ll only have to bear the burden of being “wrong” for a while.
To put it another way, maybe utility + magic = trust which is a question of balancing both sides of the equation. Whereas vision + time = x, because you might still be wrong in the end.
In terms of product messaging, maybe the clumsiness of pitching the iPhone as a three-in-one product (phone, iPad and internet browser) was just a case of spelling things out to us. Once you used the iPhone, you got it, but it was hard to translate that feeling without a live demo.
When it comes to product messaging then, perhaps the lesson is not to be afraid of spelling things out. Recently Violeta Nedkova introduced me to the 3x3 method, which is a great way to approach the problem of talking about what your product does.
Finally, Anandtech went crazy and wrote a Siracusian-length review which I didn’t finish then and I won’t finish now. They did, however, boil everything down to the UI. The iPhone wasn’t a new way of calling people, but it was better. It wasn’t a new way of accessing the internet on your phone, but it was better.
For me, this is one of the clearest signs that design matters most. Launching the original iPhone seems awkward and a little simplistic in hindsight — from the questions raised by the reviewers to the story told by Apple. But, as an audience we had to be led step by step through each of the features, and through each of our respective concerns.
The killer feature of the iPhone was its simplicity and its design. Apple could afford to wait for everyone to discover this, but startups typically don’t have the luxury of time.
There’s a lesson here in launching something and being durable enough to survive long enough for the market to adapt. Stamina and durability are super-powers for startups, given that they are naturally ahead of the curve. More often than not, being early is the same as being wrong, but if you can be early, right and patient, that’s a winning combination.
