Someone had the wisdom to create an advisory board for FlashFiler, TurboPower's client/server database engine for Borland Delphi.
We received a lot of feedback from the public newsgroup, most of it positive. But we wanted to give the actively pro-FlashFiler developers the opportunity to more directly influence the product's direction.
We'd always responded to customer requests and included most of the source code tweaks submitted in the newsgroup. But this was an opportunity to give certain people closer contact with the development team and beta releases of the next version.
This was the first time I'd been involved in this sort of thing. In my opinion, it worked out pretty well for TurboPower and myself. Hopefully it worked out well for the participants.
I don't remember the exact number; there were between 8 and 12 members. Just as we used newsgroups for public technical support, we used private newsgroups for the FlashFiler Advisory Board. One was used primarily for discussions, a separate one to store downloads.
Advisory board members gave us their wishlist of what they wanted in FlashFiler 2. They reviewed the design, gave us feedback, and we adjusted accordingly. When we got to the point of releasing code to them, they tried it out. I still can't get over Thorsten. In his own words, "I always was someone who reads the source code first and the manual second". I think Thorsten and others had problems spotted before they even ran the executables.
When FlashFiler 2 was released, the advisory board didn't go away. We used it to distribute beta versions of maintenance releases and to discuss things that we wanted the members to know but didn't want to discuss in the public newsgroup. Because the members also helped provide technical support in the public newsgroups, we were able to warn them about specific issues that we knew might show up in public.
If I find myself in a similar situation, selling a product that people truly enjoyed, I'd do the same thing again. As I've read elsewhere, markets are conversations. And having a group of customers closely involved with you, behind the scenes, sparks one heck of a conversation. It's one way to implement the following from Hugh MacLeod:
It’s no longer just enough for people to believe that your product does what it says on the label. They want to believe in you and what you do. And they’ll go elsewhere if they don’t.
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Sean Winstead
Tags: ISV, Customers