Mint and the excellent marketing of Shaun Inman
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As some of you may know I'm a user of ShortStat created by a designer I really admire: Shaun Inman. It's not the most advanced or comprehensive stats package out there but it's definitely the prettiest one on the block. Also, it's really good at the few things it does. I liked it so much that I slightly improved it in order to work in situations in which you can't run PHP code in realtime, killing some spammers in the process as well. Then came the silence.... And then there was... Mint.
Mint has been buzzing around on the web for quite a bit. From what I've read on several blogs it looks like Mint is going to be an instant hit. Shaun indicated it's not going to be free but will cost a little bit of money. Even though it will only cost a little bit of money I expect a gazillion people (including myself, mind you) to purchase Mint. This is actually wholly remarkable with so many free stats programs out there. The 'campaign' behind Mint so far is simple but amazing at the same time. Shaun Inman is quite a well known person in the design-scene and the blogosphere and it seems he's utilizing this very fact extremely well.
Mint is everywhere, several people have been bloggging about it including other well known bloggers such as one of my other favorites: Mike Davidson. And heck, now even I am blogging about it. Some little pieces of screenshots here and there, some other well known bloggers such as Jeff Croft, Neubix' Keegan Jones and Matt Thomas provided with a beta version to test and blog about to create even more buzz in the blogosphere and what we've got is a true hype. One could now wonder what would have happened if a totally unknown programmer/designer would have come up with the same thing. Samy hype? I believe not. Would it sell? A little maybe but people will easily say 'well I'm not gonna shell out any money for a stats program since so many of them are freeware'. Not so with Mint.
Mint and the hype around it creates interesting perspectives. We can take a relatively common piece of software (in this case a stats analyzer) and create a new incarnation of it with just one thing that sets it apart from it's competition: it's looks. Looks can create quite a buzz, look at Symphony for example. The only thing Shaun will have to do is actually ship the product in time, unlike what's happening with Symphony and he'll probably have quite some nice business. Then we have to make sure it's being featured before actual release on influential weblogs such as the ones I mentioned before and it's clear we've got enough buzz to pull off something very nice. Of course the product itself must be good, mind you. It's not like Shaun can sell something really crappy just because his name is Shaun Inman. I expect Mint to kick ass, just like ShortStat does.
So here I am, anxiously waiting for Mint's release and slightly jealous (in a positive way) of it's great success even before it's release. Way to go Shaun, you've deserved it!
Here's the hall of fame Shaun has gathered around Mint:Now how's that for a PR team eh?
Mint is everywhere, several people have been bloggging about it including other well known bloggers such as one of my other favorites: Mike Davidson. And heck, now even I am blogging about it. Some little pieces of screenshots here and there, some other well known bloggers such as Jeff Croft, Neubix' Keegan Jones and Matt Thomas provided with a beta version to test and blog about to create even more buzz in the blogosphere and what we've got is a true hype. One could now wonder what would have happened if a totally unknown programmer/designer would have come up with the same thing. Samy hype? I believe not. Would it sell? A little maybe but people will easily say 'well I'm not gonna shell out any money for a stats program since so many of them are freeware'. Not so with Mint.
Mint and the hype around it creates interesting perspectives. We can take a relatively common piece of software (in this case a stats analyzer) and create a new incarnation of it with just one thing that sets it apart from it's competition: it's looks. Looks can create quite a buzz, look at Symphony for example. The only thing Shaun will have to do is actually ship the product in time, unlike what's happening with Symphony and he'll probably have quite some nice business. Then we have to make sure it's being featured before actual release on influential weblogs such as the ones I mentioned before and it's clear we've got enough buzz to pull off something very nice. Of course the product itself must be good, mind you. It's not like Shaun can sell something really crappy just because his name is Shaun Inman. I expect Mint to kick ass, just like ShortStat does.
So here I am, anxiously waiting for Mint's release and slightly jealous (in a positive way) of it's great success even before it's release. Way to go Shaun, you've deserved it!
Here's the hall of fame Shaun has gathered around Mint:Now how's that for a PR team eh?
At 04 September '05 - 14:13 Pascal wrote: