Thank you all for your contributions and thought starters to the threshold aging question over at the forum. It has been both challenging and humbling to try and keep up with you all.
We’ve had a pretty heated debate here at Quirky surrounding the issue, and found ourselves agreeing or at least considering almost all of your comments (which didn’t make make coming to a conclusion very easy). Given the magnitude of this decision, and the influx of things to consider, we’ve decided to slow this process down a bit… implement a few of your ideas and see where things take us.
Here’s where we stand:
Instead of trying to make assumptions about why things aren’t hitting thresholds, and make arbitrary rules/decisions based on those assumptions, we’ve decided to set out on a round of discovery, inspired by Judi Sigler‘s post-mortem idea.
On product pre-sales pages, we will be adding a four-button questionnaire available to all users who did not commit to that given product. It will allow them to choose the reason why they did not commit — something like: “Don’t like the design,” “Price,” ”Don’t need it,” or “I’d need to see the real product first.”
Further, to speed things up, we will be sending out an email blast to all users sometime in the next 2-3 weeks which will link to a short survey that will allow users rapidly debrief us on why they did or didn’t act on each product.
We believe both of these actions will provide us with a ton of insight, which will allow us to make rules about product aging based upon real data.
Once we have this data, we will re-evaluate each one of these ideas, plus any new ones that pop up:
- The Shelf/Icebox/Graveyard
Kill a product after a certain amount of time and put it in a graveyard, where members can vote to resurrect a project at any time.
- Commitments expiring after 90 days.
After 90 days, your commitment expires, and you will get an email telling you to go back and re-commit to the product.
- Sales trajectory assessments, to accompany thresholds.
Given sales data from the previous X weeks, we can determine whether or not (if kept on the same trajectory) the product could hit threshold within 3-6 months. If not, the product gets shelved.
We’re excited to be making this decision and going through this process with you all.
Soo… what do you think?
