To understand this post, you might need to read this first.

So, I did what I’d advised my subscribers to do and I went to the site when I got the early notification. Credit card in hand, I was ready to push whatever purchase button was on there.

Except I couldn’t.

The site broke down within a couple of minutes of opening. In fact it was so bad at one point that Mike Filsaime had to publicly ask his visitors to stop trying to place orders because his technicians couldn’t even login into the server to fix it.

Bit of a public mess. And as you might imagine a lot of people got angry that they had to wait, or that they might not get a copy.

About 6 hours later I got my copy so I’m now good to go. Great. But a lot of people are still feeling annoyed. Personally, I think they should be learning from the whole experience, both the good points and the bad points.

Let me break down what I saw as good and bad:

Good:

• Very effective use of affiliates to generate lots of interest
• Extremely high value offer
• Regular updates as to how it was going
• Prizes for the affiliates that meant even newbies had a shot at a prize
• Very clear disclosure that there would be a continuity element
• Honest admissions that their newsletter wasn’t so good before
• Highly persuasive case study testimonials

Bad:

• Not expecting a lot of people to be ordering at once. Come on! Over 45,000 people pre-registered for early access! Isn’t that a bit of a clue?
• Not adequately testing that their site would cope with high numbers of people ordering at once, as opposed to viewing at once.
• Using what appeared to be poor code, not optimized for transaction speed (at least according to someone even more techie than I am)
• Having no backup server/site/order button ready to go ‘just in case’

Not such a big list of things that went wrong, is it?

I suspect most of us are not going to have 45,000 people chomping at the bit for one of our product launches, but it shows what can go wrong. Now of the items I’ve listed as going wrong, all but the first one should have been solved by the technical guys on Mike’s team. The first one, though, is something any of us could contemplate.

It doesn’t require technical knowledge, just a bit of forethought. The second item on the list should have been done – testing of a web site is extremely important. In Mike’s case he’s got a full team of people who could have helped with that and he’s got programmers who could have created ’stress’ tests to simulate a worst-case scenario.

At least they kept people informed as best they could on their Ustream video, although it was a little galling to see them sitting there at times, looking like they weren’t even breaking a sweat to get the thing fixed.

I suppose what it translates into for the average marketer is that anyone can get it wrong, but not everyone has the resources to put it right the way Mike has done. Offering to have extra copies of the product made for anyone who missed out costs hard cash.

And don’t expect too much sympathy from a large crowd if you’ve got it wrong. There were people on the Ustream chatrooms who were very aggressive.

For my own part I apologize profusely if you had wasted time waiting for this to work as a result of my recommendation. Sorry.

I hope you managed to get your copy. If not, there’s still a bit of time left since he’s effectively reset the clock and if you order today you should be able to get your copy at Butterfly Marketing.

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