As the curator of the INSIDER Guide to New Product Development, I’m constantly keeping an eye out for bite-size information that will help you develop and scale better subscription products.  Here’s my “Five on Friday” compilation for August 5th, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week.  

1.  Why Some People Don’t Watch News Videos

Business Insider recently published an article including this chart (based on data from Statista) that provides interesting insight into why some people do not watch news video.  The key?  Reading is faster.  

How pervasive is this preference?  According to a Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, only 24% of those surveyed has watched online news videos in the last week. A recent poll of 50,000 online users conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that only 24% of people had watched any news videos online in the last week.

2.  Make Sure Your Website Reinforces Your Position as a Thought Leader

Making yourself available to news sources as an industry expert is a great way to showcase your skills to the market.  But your website and other media must look like they belong to an expert.  This article on entrepreneur.com shares the reality of trying to build industry credibility without a credible online presence:

The article goes on to offer five must-have basic website elements that should be in top shape if you’re going to put your name out there as an industry expert:

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  Color and design. Mauve, electric yellow or colored print on a black background? Gotta go.

• Calls to action.  If you’re not engaging with visitors your site, you might not be gathering the input you need to qualify as an industry expert. One-question surveys or requests for opinions on topical events are good CTAs.

• Speedy site load. As many of us know, journalists work on deadlines; they don’t have time to watch your “working” icon spin.

• Contact information and social media links above the fold. Again, the clock is ticking and a reporter isn’t going to spend too much time trying to figure out how to get a hold of you. Make it easy – and make sure whoever responds to your “[email protected]” email knows where to route press inquiries.

• Responsive design. Something we’ve been talking about for a while now. If you’re website doesn’t look good on a smartphone, you’re losing prospect traffic as well as press opportunities.

3.  Where to Find Product Managers

If you’re new to running a SaaS subscription business, or are expanding your team but have few contacts with classic product development experience, you can turn to the experts for help. Pragmatic Marketing is the holy grail when it comes to best practices in product leadership, and their experts often provide wide-ranging tips on the subject as well.  In their Spring 2016 magazine, they offer several sites to help you find well-trained product people, including: Angellist (for startups), SimplyHired, Mind the Product (for UK and EU) and ProductHire.  I agree with them, however, that you should always check in with your own network, and with good product leaders already on staff.

4. Marketing Charts Provide Insight and Justification for Product Strategy

These self-described “50 Most Important Marketing Charts of 2016” from various sources and aggregated by Percolate, are a mixed bag, value-wise, but you can certainly use some of them to create market sizings, justify strategic direction and in general educate your teams about the market. My take on the most pertinent ones:

• Slide 4: two-thirds of all internet time is spent on a mobile device.

• Slides 21-24: ad blocking is on the rise.

• Slide 29: publishers will block content.

• Slide 56: people still want to call customer service on the phone.

5. Don’t Overthink Your Product Launch

“Failure to launch” is a common outcome of our desire to achieve product perfection before taking it to the market.  But waiting too long – or over-engineering without customer feedback – can be deadly. There’s some good advice in this entrepreneur.com article on this topic.  No time?  In a nutshell, it asserts that you should take you product to market as quickly as possible for these reasons:

• Maintaining your competitive edge. Even with non-compete agreements in place, the longer you keep an idea in development, the longer other market entrants have to scoop your idea. 

• Perfection is impossible.  There’s no way to get it completely right inside the four walls of your office.

• Go big or go home. A slight misnomer, this reason is an extension of “perfection is impossible – without iterating as a response to customer feedback.” Businesses get the best results by launching a viable-but-not-perfect product and iterating rapidly and consistently based on subscriber response.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Diane