I invited everyone I knew in the business world, who would listen, to join me on a zoom call, to see the demo. This became the routine, as I did dozens of demos over the months leading up to our first major customer launch. I gained quite the reputation for being the “network of networks” guy, a somewhat crazed entrepreneur with a vision in his head for a future only he could see.
Still, those demos were hugely helpful, both in getting feedback to improve the early product as well as getting feedback on the overall opportunity that Shoptype represented. When something as fundamental as the Internet changes in a non-trivial way, fortunes can be made and lost.
Unlike the old Internet, the new Internet we were working on was fair and transparent and would work for everyone, not just the platform companies. We ran into two types of people, those that got it very quickly and those that didn’t. Even when people were positive about Shoptype, they often took several passes before realizing the profound depth of change possible with a system that rewires incentives and redistributes cash flows on the Internet.
Unlike well-funded companies that could afford usability studies and fancy focus groups, we just took the product out in the wild and began to show as many people as possible. Our UX was simple, not only because we preferred function over form, but because we really didn’t have a budget for much of a designer. We just kept things as straight up as we could, hoping once folks understood the underlying economic model, they’d quickly understand the simple user experience.
That was generally true, and even so many times, the first few folks who saw a new feature would uncover simple things we should have thought through ourselves, and perhaps with an experienced designer we would have. But we tweaked things quickly and kept rolling. Investment in a new design language and something more comprehensive would have to wait until later.
