How To Actually Improve Your Product With GIFRO
Here at Receptive HQ we have a little mantra, a little motto that governs our approach to product, to marketing, and well, to everything we do.
What is it?
It’s “GIFRO”.
If you haven’t come across this particular acronym before, let me enlighten you…
Get
It
F**king
Rolled
Out
Too many companies obsess over small details and make sure things are perfect before putting them out into the world. New features or improvements are only rolled out once they’ve been crafted in a way the team thinks is the best.
In the past this made more sense. Software was shipped on CD-ROMS (remember those?) and so the product had to be finished. You couldn’t just send out another disc in a week once you discovered a bug.
But the SaaS world is fast-moving. At Facebook, their motto was “Move fast and break things.” They identified early on in their lifespan that they had to quickly iterate and improve on a continual basis if they wanted to get ahead.
Obviously that ended up working pretty well for Facebook (current data crisis aside…ahem…!)
The unique position of the B2B SaaS business
SaaS companies find themselves in the unique position of being able to gather prioritized feedback ongoing and release new features & updates with the click of a button. Their users can then benefit from those updates right away.
The SaaS organizations that realize this are the ones that make it to the top. They iterate to solve problems and involve the customers in the process.
I’m not saying that we release software full of bugs and issues. We run Test Drive Development and a strict testing schedule. But the speed with which we do things is the important part.
Let’s say we work for a couple of weeks on an improvement to solve a problem for our users. Once it’s usable, we prepare to roll it out. Usable is the minimum.
While other companies might spend a long time building more and more, we solve problems for our customers and balance that with where we want to take the business. Balancing customer feedback with our strategy is key. Once we solve a problem, we ship it.
We GIFRO.
Get
It
F**king
Rolled
Out
It allows our users to play around with updates, provide feedback, and start benefiting as soon as possible.
All those little fixes and improvements can then be made on a continual basis. Very often the ongoing customer feedback takes our product in a much better direction than we would have come up with on our own. (And no, we aren’t saying you should blindly listen to everything your customers say…)
This goes for our marketing too. Instead of worrying about making a webinar perfect, we just ran one, made sure the content added real value and iterated from there.
It means our product and content is always improving and offering more and more value to our customers and the wider SaaS community.
Get into the spirit of GIFRO, it pays off
Why am I telling you all this?
Well, because I think that every SaaS company should adopt the GIFRO mindset.
If you iterate on real problems and put people & value at the core of everything you do then you have a much better growth trajectory than the companies that simply add more and more features they think their customers and the market want.
Because nowadays customers demand and expect you to make improvements, add value, and get things f**king rolled out.
You’ll also find that it makes for a more productive environment. You’ll stop putting things off. If you’re aiming for perfection you’ll always find little things you can correct or work on. You’ll never get anything done so don’t be scared. Now go…
Get
It
F**king
Rolled
Out
