We said, “Make hyperlinks to Fog Creek properties (or whatever) and if
people follow the hyperlinks and buy our software, we’ll give you a percentage—
15 to 25 percent.” It was an affiliate program, just like Amazon affiliates. That
actually did get us some sales, but we put a lot of work into developing that, and
the amount of sales it got us was negligible. The administration and development
overhead were just not worth doing, and we eventually shut it down
because I was sick of writing $19 checks every month. It was a complete waste
of time; it absorbed a lot of time very early on, critically.
A third example of this was when we said, “Let’s make some kind of coupon
system”—because we had this idea that we would send people an automatic
email when they visited our website that would tell them—and we had all these
crazy ideas like, “Buy our software within the next 72 hours and get 25 percent
off.” (That thing was actually a bot that we wrote years ago, and it still runs. If
you try CityDesk, which is our least popular product right now, you will get an
Joel Spolsky 353
automatic email with a 25 percent–off coupon that you have to use in the next
72 hours.) When we launched that, it did increase our sales a little bit. It gets
people to evaluate the demo version right away—because they don’t want to
lose their 25 percent off coupon which is going to expire.
These were all marginally good marketing ideas. Unfortunately we spent a
lot of time chasing them. The one thing we learned over 5 years is that nothing
works better than just improving your product. Every minute, every developer
hour we spent on any one of these crazy things—although they had some marginal
return on the work that we put into them—was nothing compared to just
making a better version of the product and releasing it. If we had taken all the
effort we put into these crazy schemes and put it into moving our software
development schedule ahead by the equivalent amount, it would have paid off
much more.
That was probably the biggest mistake we made. And that’s the advice I give
everybody. All those little coupon schemes, this is what General Motors does.
They figure out new rebate schemes because they forgot all about how to
design cars people want to buy. But when you still remember how to make software
people want, great, just improve it.
Talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Don’t pay any attention to
the competition. They’re not relevant to you. Only talk to your customers and

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