The Verify blog

Launching a Successful Product

by Bryan November 23, 2010 in Business and Startups, Verify

We recently released the public version of Verify this month. In January we started the project with an aggressive goal of building a working prototype in 3 months for Demo. We hit our goal and we made our app available in April to a select group of companies. By July we were collecting valuable feedback from people and making adjustments to the app. In September we rolled out our commerce system and got our first transaction on the first day. It's been an amazing ride.

So what made our product launch successful? It can't really be pinned down to one decision, but we can pull out some decisive moments that made our concept work. Here are a couple factors that helped us:

• We made sure everyone working on the project understood our product goals.
• Before we had our ideas solidified, we backed into a payment plan that we thought would make sense for our audience.
• Our concept was for a product that we would use- this shaped the early marketing pieces
• We made quick sketches of every page in the app BEFORE prototyping in code.
• We skipped Photoshop and went from sketch to coded front-end pages/moments.
• We waited to start engineering the app until we had most of the core design decisions already coded in HTML.

Below is an early preso that was given to the team in January to rally everyone around a common goal.

The coolest thing about ZURB is having a talented bunch of people to work with on projects. Those that have had the opportunity to work with a great team understand just how special it is. The development of Verify was one of those products that just clicked into place. We'll spend more time writing about the pieces that contributed to the success of Verify over the next month.