It’s not often that you are presented with two separate launch-announcement blog posts for the same product, but here we are. If you haven’t already, you should check out our post announcing Ziflow online proofing. What we wanted to do with this post was give you a little more background on the three reasons why today became “Launch Day” for us. So, here's three reasons why we're launching today.
Reason #3 - Holiday Parties, Mostly
Originally we had planned to release in January 2018, right after the new year. As our product development progressed over the last few weeks, we realized that by the end of September, we’d have a solution that would meet a majority of the online proofing market’s need (side note: if there’s any doubt as to our understanding of the online proofing market, check our backgrounds here).
We weighed that against the opportunity to help marketing teams everywhere with their end of year push to get creative content reviewed, approved and activated. For many of us, Q4 is both a mad dash to fulfill last minute promotions and campaigns, as well as a relatively small window to line up the new year’s activities. Factoring in the 5-7 days worth of holidays in Q4, the typical challenge of delivering marketing projects on time becomes even more daunting.
Why? For the vast majority of marketing teams, email is still the primary means of collaboration for the review and approval process. Yes, in the year 2017 - the year of robots, AI and self driving cars - email is still the number one review tool.
It’s ok, we’re here to help.
When we considered that our fellow marketers might miss holiday parties due to project deadlines, or have their Thanksgiving four-day-weekends cut in half due to re-work requests and the Christmas mornings spent tearing through email threads instead of tearing through wrapping paper, we figured if we were able to help even a few marketing teams hit their deadlines (and make the holiday party), it’d be worth it.
Reason #2 - Reid Hoffman said so
Many of you have probably have heard Reid Hoffman’s quote about shipping product.
You may have heard me say: If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too latehttps://t.co/r4JyKzzyWO
— Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) March 29, 2017
It’s hard to argue with the guy who disrupted both the finance and recruiting industries.
The Ziflow product team is very accustomed to the idea of “release early and release often”. In the time that you’ve read this, we’ve already released twice.
So, if you find a typo in our documentation, or some blatant kerning issue in our UI, we’ll be excited to get that feedback, because it means you’re using Ziflow (and love giving feedback). We’ll be a little embarrassed, but we’ll get over it.
We’ll be sure to fix those issues when we deploy new features daily, in our quest to define the online proofing market, again.
And yet, that's not the primary reason we're launching early.
Reason #1 - We are loving using our own product, and we think you will too
'Eating your own dog food' is a cliche in the tech industry, but in the last few weeks we've have been chowing down and loving it!
We're using Ziflow every day, to review product design, website design, website content, marketing material, etc, and we have absolutely loved the experience. Using our own product for real has accelerated completion of our own projects, while at the same time giving immensely valuable feedback to our development team.
When we realized that we we were getting so much value out of our product, it was clear to us that Ziflow was ready to share with you. Plus, we get the benefit of your feedback sooner rather than later, which means we can improve the product faster. A genuinely virtuous circle.
You can start a risk-free trial now. Give it a try, we'd love your feedback.
