And here's an example of how it applies to the software world -
You find a piece of software that does what you need. You check the feature spec, the price, the About page and then you hit Support Forums only to see a dozen of threads, latest being from two weeks ago. And then you leave, because who wants a stale piece of software that nobody wants.
The take away is to hide any sort of activity/sales indicators from the website until you get proper traction and hit the critical mass. Low numbers make more damage than they do good.
Kast activity 2 weeks ago? Sounds good! When last activity was in 2007, you should be worried. :P
There's a big, big difference between choosing software and choosing a fiction book which makes popularity much more important for software: New versions. Fiction books almost never get any sort of new version. There are no updates to fiction books. Software nearly always is updated, and updated many times. We even have multi-level version numbers (1.2.4) for all the different types of software updates.
Software is updated to fix it and to make it better. Software that's not updated means a bug you find now will stay broken. The amount of activity can (in same cases) be a proxy for how much effort the developer is going to put in. Too little activity and it's possible the software will be abandoned. Software not used much is software is software that will probably have bugs that remain broken.
A better analogy would be starting to watch an unpopular TV show with long story arcs. If it's unpopular, it's likely to be cancelled, which means you won't find out the ending.
Sort of like how reddit bootstrapped, if you have a support forum it could be beneficial to "seed" it with common problems that QA has run into, with corresponding answers.
Comments
And here's an example of how it applies to the software world -
You find a piece of software that does what you need. You check the feature spec, the price, the About page and then you hit Support Forums only to see a dozen of threads, latest being from two weeks ago. And then you leave, because who wants a stale piece of software that nobody wants.
The take away is to hide any sort of activity/sales indicators from the website until you get proper traction and hit the critical mass. Low numbers make more damage than they do good.
Kast activity 2 weeks ago? Sounds good! When last activity was in 2007, you should be worried. :P
There's a big, big difference between choosing software and choosing a fiction book which makes popularity much more important for software: New versions. Fiction books almost never get any sort of new version. There are no updates to fiction books. Software nearly always is updated, and updated many times. We even have multi-level version numbers (1.2.4) for all the different types of software updates.
Software is updated to fix it and to make it better. Software that's not updated means a bug you find now will stay broken. The amount of activity can (in same cases) be a proxy for how much effort the developer is going to put in. Too little activity and it's possible the software will be abandoned. Software not used much is software is software that will probably have bugs that remain broken.
A better analogy would be starting to watch an unpopular TV show with long story arcs. If it's unpopular, it's likely to be cancelled, which means you won't find out the ending.
Sort of like how reddit bootstrapped, if you have a support forum it could be beneficial to "seed" it with common problems that QA has run into, with corresponding answers.