Inbound Marketing Vaporware
“We’re genuinely hoping that the re-launch won’t be as cringeworthy.”
What happens when a website builder that’s yet to be developed is sold to the public? A few years back, a SaaS start-up did just that by crowdfunding what was touted as an AI-driven publishing platform that not only builds sites virtually independent of its, well, publisher, but that pulls content in from other sources (an arguably unethical practice).
It was successfully promoted to 50,000 backers paying $100 USD (for the first year of service, including a locked-in yearly rate of the same amount) mainly as a direct result of a professionally-filmed video advertisement costing approximately $50,000 USD. The whole project was very well-pitched (especially since their own front site, similar to the ad, looked the part), however, the problem rested in the fact that the company behind it was essentially selling vaporware (i.e., a software concept as opposed to a software prototype).
In other words, $5M USD (i.e., 100 times their initial investment) had been generated literally from (and from the perspective of some, for) an ad that may have also been crowdfunded using more economical means; an example would have been acquiring the first 500 backers (also known as early-adopters) exclusively through online word-of-mouth, meaning from within their social/client networks alone. Whether a single line of code was previously written is inconclusive.
What followed was a disaster as most would be able to imagine — more specifically, a severely-delayed, overwhelmingly-underperforming, and nearly feature-less product (that quickly reached its end-of-life and no longer operates) inspired several legal threats. The start-up continues to promise an updated wait-till-you-see version of the software. Still, since everyone deserves a second chance, we're genuinely hoping that the re-launch won't be as cringeworthy.