00:00:00 ◼ ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing
00:00:13 ◼ ► Today is Wednesday, February 11. Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes,
00:00:19 ◼ ► All right, so today I'm going to be talking about honesty. And it's a subject that I think
00:00:35 ◼ ► Which coincidentally I just released a video talking about, which I'll be linking to in
00:00:40 ◼ ► the show notes, so if you're curious how I made the app preview for Podometer++ or want
00:00:55 ◼ ► I wanted to have a little catchphrase, a little marketing message. And the message was, I
00:01:00 ◼ ► ended up on, was set a goal, start walking, get fit. Pretty straightforward. It's a pedometer.
00:01:07 ◼ ► So what you're going to do is you're going to set a goal for how much you want to walk.
00:01:11 ◼ ► You'll walk, and hopefully as a result, you'll get fit. And the reason I mentioned that experience
00:01:19 ◼ ► as something around honesty, it got me thinking a lot though about the tricky balance that
00:01:24 ◼ ► think we have to strike about marketing truth and marketing lies, I suppose. Like, is it
00:01:34 ◼ ► okay for me to say to my customer, you know, like, set a goal, start walking, and get fit.
00:01:40 ◼ ► The get fit's the part that I, you know, like, I struggled with a little bit. And maybe this
00:01:53 ◼ ► may not get fit. Like, if you set a goal and you start walking, but you're walking to Dunkin'
00:02:07 ◼ ► two, but you're unlikely going to have a healthy body and a fit lifestyle. Like, it's situations
00:02:15 ◼ ► obviously far beyond the scope of my little app that counts your steps. And so I thought
00:02:21 ◼ ► about that for a while. And I think there's a broader thing that we have to think about
00:02:31 ◼ ► also wearing other hats in that process, where I'm not just making software, I'm not just
00:02:35 ◼ ► designing software, I'm also marketing and selling software. You have to make some interesting
00:02:41 ◼ ► calls about where you're going to draw the line on marketing. Because a lot of marketing
00:02:52 ◼ ► in many ways is about you're selling a lie. You're selling this perception or this promise that,
00:03:01 ◼ ► you know, if you get this thing, then you will feel this way and your life will be better and
00:03:06 ◼ ► you will have all this fun and you'll be beautiful and happy and, you know, prancing in lilies. Like,
00:03:12 ◼ ► that's a lot of what it comes down to. You know, it's like if you buy this car and you drive this
00:03:16 ◼ ► fast, you will feel alive and powerful. And maybe you will, maybe you won't. Like marketing
00:03:23 ◼ ► is a tricky thing. And I worry about that though, as somebody who makes things and then
00:03:30 ◼ ► sells them. And there's a very direct personal connection to what I'm doing, what I'm building,
00:03:55 ◼ ► a person telling you to do that. While they may have a celebrity endorsement saying that
00:03:58 ◼ ► or whatever, it's not quite have, it isn't quite of that same message. It's not me saying,
00:04:04 ◼ ► be fit. It's this more amorphous kind of corporation telling you something. And so it could give
00:04:10 ◼ ► me some pause. And maybe think also of a situation that I often run into where people reach out
00:04:16 ◼ ► to me with feature enhancements and requests. And they say, "Hey, I love this app. It'd
00:04:35 ◼ ► that it needs to change is unfortunately different for every customer. That 10% that they were,
00:04:41 ◼ ► "Oh, it would be great if only it did this. It would be great if only it did that." That's
00:04:44 ◼ ► most of the experience of building software. And early on in my career building software,
00:04:51 ◼ ► I found that I would often respond, "Oh, that's a great idea. I'll see if I can get that in.
00:05:00 ◼ ► I'll see if I can get that into the next update. I'll see if I can work that in. That's a great
00:05:04 ◼ ► idea, I'm definitely going to do that. I started in some ways making promises. I started to
00:05:09 ◼ ► react to a customer in that way, in saying that yes, I will definitely do this, or giving
00:05:14 ◼ ► the impression maybe even that that was definitely going to do it. And at the time, that feels
00:05:19 ◼ ► great because the customer's happy. They're like, wow, I just reached out to the developer
00:05:23 ◼ ► and they say they're going to build my feature. Yes, this is great. But what I found, and
00:05:29 ◼ ► is that really I wasn't being honest. I was kind of lying to them a lot of the time because
00:05:36 ◼ ► I did A) I may not have actually been able to build that feature. Like I may have, even
00:05:49 ◼ ► little rough. Or maybe on second thought, you know, after a few cups of coffee, I realized,
00:05:55 ◼ ► maybe that's actually not such a good idea. And so I found what I started to do, and if you've
00:06:00 ◼ ► reached out to me at all, hopefully this is the response that I've given you. I started to have
00:06:04 ◼ ► to be more thoughtful about what I said in response to that. I could be like, "Wow, thank you for your
00:06:08 ◼ ► suggestion. I will keep that in mind as I work on future updates. Thank you so much for that feedback.
00:06:14 ◼ ► I'll put it on my list of things for consideration." Those are the kinds of things that I
00:06:19 ◼ ► think that I started to say, which in some ways I don't like because they're kind of soft. They're
00:06:24 ◼ ► not nearly as compelling, they're not nearly as impactful messages to this customer. They're
00:06:34 ◼ ► "Eh, maybe. Sounds sort of interesting." That's kind of a weak sauce. And so it's a tricky
00:06:43 ◼ ► balance. But in the end, what I discovered and what I found is that I felt better about
00:06:47 ◼ ► that. I felt better about those interactions when I was able to be honest with them and
00:06:59 ◼ ► So looping back to marketing messages, it's something that I thought about. Like, in this
00:07:04 ◼ ► case, is it appropriate for me to say, you know, "Get fit" as one of the marketing things
00:07:26 ◼ ► I've had some testimonials and some really kind of amazing stories come in from my customers
00:07:30 ◼ ► where I get these emails from people who talk about the tremendous impact that Pedometer
00:07:35 ◼ ► Plus Plus has had on their health, how many dozens and dozens of pounds they've lost just
00:07:44 ◼ ► And that's awesome. That's amazing. There are actually people in the world who are directly
00:07:49 ◼ ► impacted by something I made in my basement. That is mind-bending. And cool. So clearly
00:07:56 ◼ ► it's not like I'm just making up junk and throwing it over the wall. There is something
00:08:06 ◼ ► as part of a balanced diet. It's like little disclaimers you always see on cereal boxes
00:08:10 ◼ ► or on anything, it's like as part of a balanced diet, there's always that part to it. But
00:08:17 ◼ ► I don't want to necessarily have the, I want to always be able to put something out into
00:08:21 ◼ ► the world without asterisks. And this is actually something that I think about a lot. I think
00:08:33 ◼ ► and where I'll be kind of driving this home to. I've always thought that if I ever owned
00:08:43 ◼ ► want to do things with an asterisk. And if maybe if you're outside of the United States,
00:08:49 ◼ ► you may not be quite as common of a practice. But I know in the United States, almost any
00:08:53 ◼ ► piece of packaging that you have any product in, almost always there's this little asterisk
00:08:58 ◼ ► at the end of some claim, at the end of some assertion. There's a little asterisk in the
00:09:03 ◼ ► the bottom in tiny print, it has a little explanation, a little caveat, a little disclaimer,
00:09:14 ◼ ► And I've always thought if I had a big company, one of the things that my core principles
00:09:22 ◼ ► and clear and straightforward with my customers and say something that I can stand behind
00:09:50 ◼ ► not telling the whole truth. In the end, I decided with pedometer++, I'm okay with saying
00:10:02 ◼ ► I can stand behind and work on. That is the process that this app is intended and designed
00:10:14 ◼ ► going to happen to everybody. If you're walking to donuts, maybe that's not you. But it's
00:10:20 ◼ ► a reasonable claim. But I wanted to take the time this week on the show to talk about this
00:10:25 ◼ ► Because it's something that you think you really have to think about when you you make a product. How are you going to market it?
00:10:37 ◼ ► Are all the things that you're saying things that you are comfortable with and would defend and don't have asterisks?
00:10:50 ◼ ► good way, in an honest way, and the kind of business that I want, I'm striving to build myself, and the kind of types of
00:10:57 ◼ ► businesses that I want to, you know, that I want to frequent, people that I want to support,
00:11:04 ◼ ► So much of, in so much of business, and in the App Store especially it seems sometimes, but I'm sure this is not unique to us.
00:11:19 ◼ ► coerce, manipulate to make customers do things that they may not want to do, may not have
00:11:33 ◼ ► that aren't really honest or trying to appeal to people's worst characteristics rather than
00:11:39 ◼ ► aspirationally appealing to their better characteristics. And I think that's the kind of thing that
00:11:56 ◼ ► about these kinds of things, that you don't, your question isn't just, what can I put on
00:12:01 ◼ ► this label to get the most downloads? It's what message that is true and honest and representative
00:12:06 ◼ ► of my application will also get lots of downloads and be representative in the first place.
00:12:12 ◼ ► Because the reality is, if you can't think of a good, honest message for your application
00:12:17 ◼ ► for the marketing label, well then you probably need to spend more time building the application