Have you ever thaught what is the perfect date to launch a new product?
In this blog i’m going to point out some of the best products launched on April fools day and I will show you why 1st april is a great date to launch a new product.
As much as I love the april fools day and all the pranks that go along there is one hoax that will never be forgotten. A hoax that was not actually hoax and ot left millions of people with eyes wide open.
It was april 1st 2004. E-mails were not a main part of communication as they are nowadays. At yahoo you were able to get a free mail inbox in a size of 4MB. At microsoft this size was even lower. And then google came out with a news that they will be offering a free inbox service with a free size of 1GB. Service known as Gmail was so smoothly presented that everybody everywhere thought it was an april hoax. Are you wondering what happened to that product later?…
I know you don’t because Gmail is the most used mailing service on the web with 15GB of free space. But its 11 years old so Google is already taking steps to a modern interface named Inbox.
What is it about the products published on April 1st?
If you are planning to launch something that looks unbeliveable to be even possible then 1st april is the best date. If you can attract the right eyes to the presentation and your hoax is greater then 99% of others it might happen that you will be presented in every bigger news on the lists of top 10 this year hoaxes. What does this bring? Most definitely free publicity for 2 days in a row. But 2 days gets everybody with a hoax. After people see that your product was actually not a hoax they will start writing about a great product that was thought to be a hoax but it was not. It was just a great product.
Launching products on April fools day is still not quite popular but its growing fast.
In 2009 Yahoo published Yahoo Sideline which let you track the twitter news in real time. That was quite popular for a year or two but it shut down because it lacked some basic functionalities like post or follow.
Scribd also launched it’s product “Paper to iPaper” scanning service on april 1st. It worked pretty well but it had alot of downsides so it was quietly shut down in 2009
In 2008 april 1st Blinkx launched it service BBTV that lets you watch Web video programming with a live transcript next to a video player. This service is still running.
What will we be looking for on April 2nd 2015?
Tommorow everyone will keep an eye on Amazon Dash Buttons. Whole web today is full of news if this is real (as they are telling us on Amazon) or is it the april hoax. These are the product-branded buttons connected through Wi-Fi that let their Prime members order the ingredients that they have run out of simply by clicking on the Dash button.
Example: you have a button on a coffee machine and you run out of coffee. Simply by pressing the button an order is placed and you get new stock of coffee in a no-time.
Conclusion: we can see that some of products launched at april 1st are already dead. But this is probably because they were not functional and not beacuse of bad marketing. If you have a great product that seems impossible today then launch it on 1st april and you have got yourself lots of free publicity.
Bonus content: Top 3 april 2015 hoaxes (and those are real jokes)
1. Samsung Galaxy BLADE edge (Chef edition)
2. Google Panda (not a SEO algoritm but a stuffy talking panda)