The latest news from Balsamiq:
A mental hack for founders, to convince yourselves to work on marketing projects instead of just coding all the time!

Trouble viewing?
View it online.

“Winning the Whole Product battle means winning the war”
- Jeoffrey Moore

As part of our Office Hours program, I meet aspiring tech entrepreneurs, listen to their challenges, and give them some advice.

The advice I tend to give developers-turned-entrepreneurs most often is one they don’t like to hear: stop coding, and start marketing! 😊

Marketing is a word that still has some negative connotations, like trying to force someone to buy your product by exaggerating or flat out lying. The problem is that even the best product will fail without good marketing, so it’s a necessary evil.

Today I’d like to share with you - our inner circle - a mental hack to solve this problem.

Are you ready? Here it is:

Marketing Projects are Product Features

Your company website? Just a feature. Your next blog post? Just another feature, add it to the backlog.

If you think of marketing activities this way, they won’t feel icky to work on, and you’ll create marketing material which is more successful, because — just like regular product features — it will be customer- and UX-driven.

Let me explain.

The “Whole Product” concept

I first came across this concept in 2007 when reading Crossing The Chasm, still my favorite business/marketing book of all time. It’s a short book, go read it if you haven’t!

The book — written in 1991 but still extremely relevant — introduced several concepts that are now mainstream in tech marketing, and popularized the concept of The Whole Product, which was actually first talked about by Regis McKenna back in 1985, in turn inspired by Ted Levitt’s Total Product concept from 1983!

Wikipedia has an in-depth explanation, but the idea is simple: what people want to buy from you is not just what comes out of your build machine, but much, much more.

Customers obviously want to use your product’s core features, but they also expect great support (pre- and post-sale), documentation, training, APIs, portable data, a promising roadmap, privacy, a solid and ethical company, a reputable brand, fair pricing, the list goes on…

In the customers' mind, it is ALL part of your product, it’s what they’re buying from you.

If you JUST have software features, as good as they might be, that’s not enough.

How we apply this at Balsamiq

My favorite quote from Crossing the Chasm is this:

“Winning the whole product battle means winning the war”

I have tried to think of the whole product since day one, and I believe it has been a big factor in Balsamiq’s success.

Here are some examples of “whole product thinking” we have applied over the years:

While I was based in Europe, my second hire was a support person in California. Although this took 3 sets of accountants and 18 months to set up, it allowed us to give our customers a level of global customer service that our competition couldn’t match.
For the same reason, we published a phone number on our website very early on.
We were honest and transparent from day one, both about our strengths and our flaws.
We have always put A LOT of effort in having extensive and always up-to-date documentation.
On several occasions, when a customer asked us for a new feature that could actually be achieved with a little workaround, our response was to write a tutorial, not to add new code. The “Quick Tips” section of our site is full of examples of this. Note that our customers were JUST AS SATISFIED with the tutorial. In their minds, we added the feature they were asking for!
Now we have a WHOLE TEAM fully dedicated to educating our customers via the Balsamiq Wireframing Academy, which is getting better and better every day.
sometimes we take this concept to the extreme, trying to give our customers things they don’t even expect from us. The “What should I make for dinner?” Help menu is an example of it. It’s a simple feature, but you wouldn’t believe the amount of word-of-mouth publicity it has generated for us over the years.

Examples from other companies

Once you digest the Whole Product concept, it starts to explain many non-tech activities done by tech companies.

Steve Jobs was a master of this concept. When he created brick-and-mortar Apple Stores, the whole idea was to give Apple customers a great way to learn (with in-store classes) and customer support (the Genius bar). Or when he created iTunes to go alongside the iPod.

Another example is the extensive Wistia Learning Center, which complements their product beautifully. Wistia also offers their customers a podcast and a yearly user conference…they’re not software features, but they’re useful customer-focused features nonetheless.

On a smaller scale, I’ve always been impressed at Claire Lew’s whole product thinking. Her KnowYourTeam product includes non-software features like an extensive set of resources to learn from, and a whole community to share ideas with.

Look at the website of successful tech companies, and you’ll see more examples Whole Product thinking, I’m sure of it. Remember: "Winning the Whole Product battle means winning the war”.

How to find and work on your Whole Product

The same way you find and work on software features, of course! 😊

Talk to your customers, really LISTEN to them, and understand what problems they’re trying to solve.

Next, keep an open mind and get to work on a solution: it could be a new software feature, but it could instead be a new tutorial, or a new section of your website, or a combination of things. It’s all part of the same Whole Product in the end. 😊

Another way to put it is this: whoever knows their customers most intimately will build the best whole product, and consequently will win the war.

That’s why we put so much effort in talking to our customers and doing User Research. Speaking of which, we’re looking to speak to Balsamiq Wireframes for Desktop users to learn about your experiences with the new product and ask you a few questions. It won’t take more than 30-minutes and you don’t need to prepare in advance, you’re the expert 😉. Click here to schedule a call!

What happened at Balsamiq in August

As usual, August is a slower month for us, with many Balsamiq employees taking some well-deserved vacation time.

We continue to work both on our product and our company at the same time, and to support our community. Stay tuned for future announcements! 😊

UX/UI links for August

4 Lessons Web App Designers Can Learn From Google
“What we want to focus on are the components that make Google’s products so easy to use time and time again.”
-Suzanne Scacca

What You Need to Know About an App Top Bar
“As a noticeable and indispensable part of the page, sometimes an interactive top bar relieves the burden of interaction for the rest of the page”
-Yuyan Duan

Documenting Is Designing: How Documentation Drives Better Design Outcomes
“One of the best ways to ensure a design is well-reasoned is to be 'forced' to describe it verbally or by flowing out the logic.”
-Heidi Adkisson

Proximity Principle in Visual Design
“When users completely miss a link, button, or piece of information even though it’s right in front of them, proximity (or rather, the lack of it) is often to blame.”
-Aurora Harley

Jakob Nielsen's Ninth Usability Heuristic for User Interface Design
“The message needs to go beyond just stating that there has been an error. It needs to describe the problem that occurred.”
-Melissa Velazquez

That's it for this month!

We hope this mental hack will be useful to you.

We plan on turning this into a page on our website in the future. What are some examples of Whole Product thinking you’ve used in your company? Reply to this email and we might include them in the article!

Stay safe out there,