Coin & the Problem of Overpromising

Around six months ago Coin promised to revolutionize our wallets. Combining our credit cards, gift cards, even membership cards electronically into one simple, beautiful card seemed like a no-brainer. Being all for technology simplification, I was giddy with excitement. Every single tech media outlet covered their announcement and debated the death of the credit card. Thousands rushed to pre-order a piece of the revolution.

And then silence…

It’s been half a year and still no Coin. They’re promising a summer ship date, but have indicated no formal timeline.

https://twitter.com/coin/status/489427491065323521

There are several lessons to be learned here. Most importantly, viral word of mouth is wasted when you haven’t got a product. The team at Coin has a great concept and they were excited to share it with the world. It makes sense and to be fair, they probably needed the pre-order revenue to complete their build. But when you build excitement and ask for customer’s money, there’s an inherent promise that you will deliver in a reasonable amount of time. Coin’s social media mentions have gone from tremendous excitement about this revolutionary product to complaints that six months later paying customers are still empty handed.

Twin Cities-based LeadPages similarly pre-sold their idea to eager customers, but took that income and focused intensely on over-delivering a tremendous service in a timely fashion. Rather than answering hundreds of angry tweets, they’re growing faster than ever and receiving a ton of positive publicity.

Choose the appropriate moment to unveil your company. Bringing in revenue prior to having a product is great, but enthusiasm quickly turns sour when you don’t deliver. The minimalist in me sincerely hopes that Coin can someday deliver on their promises. The realist will hang on to my money until the concept is proven.

-Joseph

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Redefining the user experience

The basic premise of this blog is that we live in a world of information overload. There’s hardly a moment we are disconnected from the latest happenings around town and around the world. From 2007 to 2012, the services that succeeded and gained mass popularity were those that provided us access to the data we needed  – services like Yelp for eating out, Groupon for finding a good deal, and Facebook for, well, everything we’d ever want to know (and a lot that we wouldn’t) about our “friends”. For this five year period, we wanted as much information as we could handle at the tip of our fingers and we loved the services that gave it to us.

Times change, and our demands change. In 2014, we’re no longer looking for every detail. We’re looking for only the information that pertains to our needs at that very moment, and nothing more. We’ve got less time, and an increasingly large amount of information to consume. We want to know who’s leading the Masters without clicking a Google link for Masters.com and then searching for the leader board. When we’re planning our evening, we rarely have time to click through this:

Yelp did a great job of providing us with everything we’d want to know about the restaurants around us, but it no longer provides the value it once did. We know we want to go out to eat, and we know there are a ton of options, but we don’t have the time or interest to click through a hundred pinpoints on a map. It’s a complex service with a wealth of information that rarely helps us make a decision.

I’ll admit to my bias when it comes to planning a dining experience. Buzzcut combines the best of Yelp and Groupon while requiring the least effort from the user. We provide only pertinent information in the simplest experience. But this transition to simplicity is happening all around us. Tinder is exploding in popularity because we no longer want to sit at our computer and peruse a Facebook-style list of potential partners. Tinder predicted that the typical person decides in a manner of seconds whether they were attracted to a person. They built their experience on this premise, and have been proven overwhelmingly correct. Want proof of Tinder’s dominance? Do a quick search of “Tinder for…” and enjoy the vast array of new services built on Tinder’s premise.  My favorite of these, of course, is Buzzcut, aka the “Tinder for restaurant deals”.  🙂

Time will tell whether the market leaders are capable of transitioning to meet our changing demands. History tells us they won’t, but they certainly have the resources, if only they’d pay closer attention to their users. What other services are you using that achieve simplicity while providing value?

Interested in reading more about Tinder’s rise and the affect it has had on the mobile application industry? Read this article.

-Joseph