Have you ever gone to the internet to search for something you needed to buy? Once, an overwhelming sense of professional obligation to own all of my work software inspired me to obtain a Visio license. Rather than going to Microsoft, which may have been the most obvious thing to do, I went to Google and typed “Visio.” This was in an era of significantly more aggressive adversarial advertising. There is some kind of sick trust between Steve Ballmer and the average Microsoft customer that inspired them not to spend money on buying Google ads. While I am a gigantic fan of Microsoft developer products, I was not so in love with the Visio brand that I was willing to completely ignore the product offers from Microsoft Office competitors. SmartDraw was at the top of the sponsored links at the time, and it looked like they were ready to party.
This is how I became one of their customers. I was seduced by the novelty that Microsoft was so flagrantly uninterested in my business that they did not wish to pay to stay on top of the Google advertising spender leaderboards. I felt like I was some super-smart bargain hunter for the simple act of a mouse click.
I have about six or seven very good years of architecture diagrams from my steady relationship with SmartDraw. I think the success of their clever marketing began to cause problems. They began to iterate on SmartDraw like professional arborists “iterate” on the plants that are “under their dutiful care.”
There was a particular release where they stopped maintaining feature parity with Visio.
I don’t know what to say about what happened next. A breakup? A funeral?
SmartDraw and I were no longer seeing each other, that is for certain. After so many wonderful years, why they decided to make this change is unclear. I imagine I was not the only person who stopped using their product that day.
This is probably the first time I realized how important advertising or marketing your product is. I was a product-first “if you build it, they will come” entrepreneur. Maybe parts of me still are. Not the Derfdice part, though. I built it, and nobody came. There was a mild collision there between my aspirational view of the hardcore tabletop game dungeon master and the arrival of LLM technology. It was quite humbling to get zero million customers. Fortunately, I broke even on the product in other places and other ways.
This is a short one today. If you ever want to throw some money at a company for a product, seeing who else wants your money more is worth it. I am firmly back together with Visio again if anyone is keeping score. I have found additional replacement products over the years. Oddly, the next best example is also a Microsoft product. I was an Intellimouse lover for years, and now I find myself besties with the Razer Deathadder.
I would love to hear some stories of “surch…” Where you go to the internet to find a product and purchase something better or cheaper.
See you all next week!
