Founders at Work.pdf

Joel Spolsky 357
on my team who decided it would be useful—it would get him some notoriety
internally—if he wrote a weekly email summarizing Microsoft’s competitors.
We were the Excel team, so it was really the spreadsheet competitors, Lotus
and Borland—what they were doing and what was new and what features they
had. He sent out this email internally at Microsoft to a bunch of people for
6 weeks, until he lost interest. I remember thinking that, no matter what we
knew that the competitors were doing, the information was completely useless
to us. It never really changed what we were doing. If it’s like, “The competitors
are going to do feature x,” well, if that’s such a good feature to do, why aren’t we
hearing about it from our customers?
In other words, why listen to our customers indirectly through what our
competitors do when we can just talk to our customers? So my mantra has
always been, “Listen to your customers, not your competitors.” I don’t know
who our competitors are. Sometimes I’m asked to list other bug-tracking products,
and by now I know about Bugzilla. I think there’s something called
BUGtrack. I don’t know what they have, what their products are, what their
price point is. I could research all that, but I can’t think of a single thing I would
do with that information.
I do want to talk to people who evaluated our software and then decided to
go with a different product instead. I want to know why they did. “Well, one of
your competitors has a wiki built in.” OK, maybe we’ll have some kind of wiki
integration. But, again, that’s something I would hear from our customers and
not from paying any attention to what our competitors are doing.
Livingston: Looking back on the earlier years, what was most surprising to you?
Spolsky: Most? It was all surprising. One thing that surprised me was that,
when we released a new version of our software (we’re on 5.0 with FogBugz
already), there would be a big jump in the number of sales. We would say, “OK,
all the upgraders are upgrading right now, so that’s what accounts for the
boost.” And the surprise is that after that initial boost, the number never went
down. We expected there would be a hump after a new version was released
and that would make us want to keep releasing new versions. But instead there
was a step. A big step up. We kept thinking it was a hump that was going to go
down, then it never went down again.
Now I understand why that is. You made a better product. When you have
a better product, you will win more of the evaluations. More people who evaluate
your product will decide to purchase it. So you are now on a new permanently
high plateau in sales caused by the fact that you have a better product. It
overcomes more of the hurdles that your software is put through when users
evaluate it to see if it meets their needs.
Livingston: Who did you learn things from?
Spolsky: Oh, everyone. I can’t even begin to list the number of people who
taught me things.
I was in the Israeli army, and I learned some strategy there by mistake, by
osmosis. In order to avoid spending too much time in uniform, I did this