If you were watching this space last week, you may have seen the first two entries in what was to be a three- part blog series about new services or products that make use of the wisdom of crowds.
The third, which I was hoping to publish on Friday, did not show up on the blog. And it won’t be in Tuesday’s print edition either as what was supposed to be a three-legged column featuring the startups together.
There are a few reasons for that. One of them is limitations of print space; the first two stories were lengthy enough to fill up a print column space that shoehorning a third would have caused some problems and a lot of trimming down of the other two. That’s a solvable problem, we deal with print constraints all the time and the blog version could have been full length, no problem.
But the real reason I pulled the post was that I was going through my notes and trying out the app for myself, I realized that this was something I no longer wanted to write about. The app was not ready for public consumption and it would not have compared favorably to the other startups that had already been featured.
There were red flags along the way. I met with the CEO of the startup and had an in-person demo of the app, which was still being updated with new features. On the CEO’s own phone, the app continually crashed. This happens. Demos can go bad. I’m very forgiving of that and it could have even had something to do with trouble accessing our in-house guest Wi-Fi. But it was a demo that did not go well.
And the features rolling down the pike were being shown to me through Test Flight, a way to preview apps in progress on iOS. If an app is still in the Test Flight phase, even if it’s been released to the public in 1.0 form, that’s typically an indication that a lot of work is still being done to get the app to where it needs to be. That was another red flag.
But the decision was really made when I downloaded a Test Fight version of the app and tried to use it myself; and found I could not find value in the app in its current form. There’s an argument to be made that if I had taken the time to explore the app, to invite a bunch of my friends to also download a version of it and to create some content within the app that it would have been a better experience. But that’s not an experience I can recommend to my readers when what I was able to find in the app was simply not worth that kind of effort, at least right now.
Some products, particularly apps, are not ready to be handled by the press, just as restaurants are typically not reviewed by food critics until they are settled in for a few months.
If the startup made a mistake, it was one of bad timing; getting a product in front of a reporter that is not yet ready for a critical eye. Writing a blog post about the app’s shortcomings might have been entertaining, it might have even been a service to readers. But given that A. the app is free, B. the company came to me in good faith and is not out in public making grand claims about how great its app is, it would have felt petty and spiteful to do so. Even naming the company in this post, I feel, could be damaging and unnecessary.
I have let the company’s rep know that the story was pulled and have told them I’d be happy to take another look at the app down the road when it has had more time to develop into something I can recommend (or at least suggest is worth trying out) to my readers.
And that’s why that happened.
If you disagree with my decision or feel that I should have made a different call, I'm all ears. Please post in the comments or hit me up on Twitter.
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