PR Case Study: Where Color Went Wrong
Sunday, March 27, 2011 at 4:42PM 
By now, you may have heard of the little app that could(n't), Color. Funded to the tune of $41M pre-launch, co-founded by a prestigious Silicon Valley entprepreneur and already brimming with 27 employees, you'd expect the product to be decent if not extraordinary.
And you'd be wrong.
Last Thursday, Color launched to the public and announced its insanely large funding round. The initial stories were generally positive, mostly focusing on the company's hand-fed messages about how it hopes to change social networking and flush of funding.
People wanted to like it, they really did.
But then a funny thing happened. They started downloading the app. And that's where things got interesting.
It was bad. So very bad.
Between the confusing UI, non-intuitive icons, eerily requiring users before entering the app to take a picture of themselves, and if you're like me being greeted by only one or two pictures of lonely people in their apartments, the first impression was horrible. And it didn't get much better after that.
When I downloaded it on Thursday, I thought for a second maybe I wasn't too intelligent to "get it." I couldn't figure out what the icons were for or how to see photos of all the other users. But kinda like tasting bad coffee right after brushing your teeth, I soon realized it was Color and not me. Did the PR team even use the product before creating the launch strategy? If so, surely they would have toned down some of the insanely bold "changing the world" messaging.
Let's be clear: A handful of media and bloggers have lauded the company for pushing the boundaries of social networking. It is a compelling app from that perspective i.e. we all know little about the lives of people who are physically closest to us. Color wants to change that. But for the most part, Color set a world-record for losing the media, the tech-savvy early adopter crowd and mainstream America from the get go.
Want proof? As of today (four days after the launch), Color only has a 2-star average rating in iTunes. And one of its few, very few "5 star" reviews? Yeah, that's a satire review that has made Techmeme itself.
I really wish I could have been in the conference room when the Color team debated how to launch this thing. It's hard to know exactly what they were thinking, and why they chose to introduce the product when and how they did.
To be fair, there are a lot of factors that can go into how to launch a product, and why you might do it under less than ideal circumstances. Investor pressure. Running out of money (Color obviously does not have this problem). Deciding it's "good enough." Simply being blinded by your passion that you can't see your product for what it is. I know I'm leaving a lot out here....
Not knowing what happened behind closed doors, here's my first blush assessment - as someone who works day in and out introducing products/companies to the world - on where Color went wrong.
How not to launch an app (specifically Color)
MISTAKE #1: Announcing the funding and the company, and releasing a (less than) subpar app at the same time. Why did the app have to be released along with the funding? Why not announce the company and funding and keep the app under wraps until it was ready for prime time? This would have solved several major issues. 1) Assuming Color was under investor pressure to launch, revealing the enormous funding round would still have created a healthy dose of buzz around the company; and 2) this approach would have bought the development team more time to do some clearly needed refinement to the product.
MISTAKE #2: Doing a national launch. Color is an app that works best in densely populated areas or at events (ball games, parties, etc.). A lot of people have wondered why they didn't launch at SXSW Interactive a few weeks ago. True, it might have done very well there but according to a response from one of Color's employees on Quora, the product simply wasn't "ready" then. I think most of us would agree it's not "ready" now either... I don't always agree with Scoble's assessments, but he offered a lot of great ideas in his audio review of Color. For example, why not put Color in the hands of some of the cool kids in NYC, LA, San Francisco, Austin, etc. and get some good buzz going before unleashing it to the hounds? Or, simply choose another venue than SXSW? Just check out Lanyrd for a list of upcoming conferences. Great events are happening all the time. They could have fun with it, too. Why not launch at one of the big summer music festivals and form some sort of "official app" sponsorship with the organizers?
MISTAKE #3: Using hyperbolic, if not misleading, messaging. Everyone wants to say his or her product is the best thing ever. Sometimes it is, but more often than not, it isn't. In working with entrepreneurs, a huge role of the PR team needs to be striking a balance between staying true to the broader vision a founder wants to get across while not making journalists pull out the barf bag. Color's press release has astoundingly bold messaging that also positions the app as something that currently lives up to the larger vision, when all you have to do is download it to see otherwise. Here's some phrases straight from the release:
- Color Reinvents Community (headline)
- A miraculous, free application
- "Once or twice a decade a company emerges from Silicon Valley that can change everything. Color is one of those companies" (quote from Sequoia Capital investor)
- Getting to know new people is almost impossible online...Color is social networking for a Post-PC world (This is just not true. Most people I know have made a good handful of their "real" friends online. Also, millions of people have met their significant others online. I get where they are going with this, but the message itself needs to be tightened)
This is a great example of getting much too "pat-yourself-on-the-back" happy in a press release. The messages don't reflect the current state of the app, which right now is pretty unusable. This brings me to the fourth thing Color messed up on:
MISTAKE #4. Providing no information/tutorials on how to use the app. When I first loaded up the app, I was confused. What did all the icons mean? What did they do? The UI was one of the worst I've come across. Naturally, I went to the color.com website in hopes of getting some more information on how to use the app correctly. They would have some more details there, right? NO. Not even a simple "About Us" page or FAQ. And no screencast or tutorial. Color comes off as not caring about its users. In fact, the website itself, which the co-founder paid $350k for the domain for - is more or less empty. Investing that much money in the domain and not even putting it to use during the launch gives me a huge case of the sads. Color could have easily pushed off the launch a day or two and created some supporting materials - even if they were stupidly basic - and uploaded them to the site.
MISTAKE #5: Relying too heavily on the pedigree of the co-founder. Without fail, one of the best ways to get the attention of the tech media if you're a startup is to have a co-founder who has done amazing stuff in the past. Look at Path. Square. Hipmunk. They all got great press when they launched. And the one thing they all had in common? Well-known and respected founders who have been involved in some of Silicon Valley's more well-known success stories.
Color has the same advantage. The founder, Bill Nguyen, is legit. He sold his last company LaLa to Apple a few years back. Another company for $850M before that. He's a Silicon Valley success story and clearly a smart guy.
Who knows if Path, Square and Hipmunk will see long-lasting success. But one thing the founders of these companies have that Bill doesn't - sorry to say - is a usable product. Mainstream users won't care if your founder is hot stuff if your product doesn't work.
So they screwed up. What now?
I'm probably missing a lot of other mistakes, but you get the point. Color's strategy was simply off. It's easy to say this in hindsight, but to give them the benefit of the doubt PR can be extremely unpredictable. Unlike programming, you can't put X and Y into an equation and guarantee someone Z will happen. You only have best guesses. Maybe the Color team knew they were introducing a subpar product and that some people would rag on them for it, but surely they didn't expect all of THIS.
If I was in charge of the PR for Color's launch, I would have done several things differently, including:
- Advising them to wait until they had a respectable version of the app that lived up to some of their lofty goals of reinventing community/social networking;
- Toning down the "change the world"-esque messaging. They can talk to this larger vision, but make it clear it's an end goal; they're not there yet;
- Making sure they had supporting launch materials in place. A screencast video. An FAQ. An About section, etc. These would have gone a LONG way for them.
But they didn't do any of this and now the Color team is in the awkward position of having to play the role of the comeback kid. They are going to have to prove to the media, the public and investors their product is really worth the huge investment and attention (albeit mostly negative) they've garnered these last few days.
It won't be easy, but not impossible...
So where should they go from here? In my opinion, their focus right now should be on creating support materials to help users who haven't deleted the app already figure out how to actually use the product. They should also be building a longer-term plan to communicate what's coming down the pike and what major improvements users can expect to see and when. This will require laser-like communication between the person managing PR, and the development and product teams. They can't afford more hyperbole that isn't aligned with the product roadmap.
Once they have a communication plan in place, they should consider offering an exclusive conversation with Bill and the NYT, WSJ or TechCrunch, etc. to talk about the strategy and afterward disseminating it widely to anyone and everyone who has written about the app.
And then, for Christ's sake forget about being a PR darling for a while and work wildly on executing on the vision.
Color: People love a good comeback story. It's now on you to prove all of your naysayers wrong.
Reader Comments (11)
Odd week, odd app. DJ Patil's answer on Quora is sparse, and whilst I'm sure it was the case their app wouldn't have been ready to use at SXSW, he doesn't say if that was their plan. I have to believe that it was. You're completely right that launching at some other event might have been better long term than this (though no other conference would have generated awareness like a successful SXSW, so I can also understand them writing it off.)
The sad thing is that the app would have been excellent at SXSW. Yes, the EVERYTHING SCROLLS IN EVERY DIRECTION user interface is initially incomprehensible, but once you regain your balance it is optimised nicely for quickly flipping through large numbers of pictures, and real time updates are smooth. We had a bit of a play with it in the Twitter office on Friday and with a decent core of us using the app, it was a lot of fun. We took a lot of pictures of other people taking pictures of people using Color, but… no matter. What we do for fun isn't the point.
I would imaging that a conference setting, music festival or sporting event might be a really great place for this kind of UI, and sharing temporary images in public. The trouble—much like the Group Messaging apps that did hit it big at SXSW—is why on earth someone would use this any of the rest of the time. It's a minority of the time that you're looking to interact with strangers (and different than being in a new place, discovering places from stranger's picture archive, ala Flickr's Nearby view; there's no benefit to the transience of Color's photographs there.)
As for the funding (and the PR around that funding) I don't think I understand entirely why they'd release the figure at all. Once companies are up and running, periodic bragging about new investment seems a somewhat useful way of demonstrating people's faith in the product that's been launched, but to do it pre-emtively seems like nothing but a distraction from judging the product on fair terms. And all that time they have color.com as their domain! That would've drawn plenty of attention alone rather than a price tag, which just draws ridicule.
MISTAKE #1: Announcing the funding and the company, and releasing a (less than) subpar app at the same time.
This is a bit of a circle actually, because the app looks quiet decent. It's only the bloggers and early adopters adjusting their expectation of the app according to the amount of funding they have received. This is obvious by the fact that so many entries out there about Color almost always mentions the $41 mill VC funding.
MISTAKE #2: Doing a national launch.
That's actually a good idea but not going to happen in real life because of the buzz that they are getting due to the $41MIL news. See "MISTAKE #1"
MISTAKE #3: Using hyperbolic, if not misleading, messaging.
Everyone does that to promote their startup. Also see "MISTAKE #1" where the hyperbuzz meant huge expectations of the app.
MISTAKE #4. Providing no information/tutorials on how to use the app.
Good points here. I'm inclined to see Color as something WIP, not even close to a finished product.
MISTAKE #5: Relying too heavily on the pedigree of the co-founder.
Not sure how this could be a PR fail? You'd have to point the finger to the VC's who funded Color in the first place, but people will always look at the co-founder's history so either Bill Nguyen do a name change or get over it.
Do you have some sort of personal vendetta against the founders? Civilized discourse seems to get away from you.
Deriding the product repeatedly does not make you sound smart. We get it- you don't like it.
Overall, your post demonstrates a significant lack of understanding about product development and iteration. It's been many years since tech companies were expected to release a Picasso in version one.
If you're trying to drum up business for yourself, you're going about it all wrong. As a co-founder of a tech startup, I would never hire anyone who communicated with such negativity and bitterness.
Dumping all over someone's baby does not make you an expert.
The first half of your post is right on.
But you falter a bit with
"How not to launch an app (specifically Color)"
They didn't just rely too fervently on a founder's pedigree.
Their personal bubble was in believing their own hype.
And by their own, I am including the salivators at Sequoia.
Here's what you (and everyone else) are missing:
They used *The news* of the $41 million pre-launch funding,
(+ the dependable echo-chamber marketing machine
that the tech blogosphere has devolved to), AS the launch strategy.
I would bet my last dollar that as this ill-conceived "data mining app",
and launch strategy were only 3/4 done when someone got the
idea to launch prematurely, let users be the unwitting beta testers,
iterate quickly on feedback, and
*expect that the average idiot perceive the crazy-early
$41M as remarkable 'social proof'
Sadly, many DO assimilate terrible products into their worlds
and ignore their own reservations because;
"Well, everyone else is doing 'it' and some investors who are
way smarter than I am gave them $40Milllion!
It must be amazing even if I think it sucks and makes me feel
like a Guinea Pig"
Perhaps those in-the-know at Color and Sequoia see a path
to extraordinary data (look what it's done for Facebook).
But launching a terrible product in stunning, amateurish
style won't get them there.
Well. social-media is boring now isn't it? Entrepreneurs are boring - people out to self-enrich.... really, who cares? Other people out to self-enrich? They're boring as well.
This "app/company/thing" is classic bubble-symptom material. It's not just that this is a crap-app, it's that the whole idea of "Ooh-neato, a new way to spend even more time on the internet - 'connecting with friends and organising my stuff'" is passé to the point of torpor. We already have everything we need to do that.
It's not just an economic bubble, it's an interestingness bubble. The people talking up "startups" and "entrepreneurs" and "new apps" as though they're interesting are themselves looking decidedly hollow on that front.
We're interested in revolution and high art. Everything else is just dust in the wind dude. Everything else is just talk.
Normally startups should launch early, but organizations like color are a special case. They built up a huge amount of goodwill, prior to their full launch. This meant they had a lot more to lose, so they should have taken the same decision as an incumbent. Color should have been cautious and done a limited beta, explained as a staged rollout.
http://blog.marketingxd.com/post/4061005620/this-is-your-last-chance-to-make-a-first-impression
Overwhelmed by all the feedback. Thanks everyone for your thoughts.
@Ben Ward Really good perspective all around. To be fair, I haven't seen Color perform in a dense user environment. Certainly nothing like the Twitter offices. Sounds like it's a much better experience.
@Hannah I've heard the app looks a bit better in the iPhone 4, so *some* of my (and others) poor experience could be attributed to having older models. And yeah, good point on #5. The press was going to focus on the founder either way. What I was trying to get at is they had a lot of hype to live up to given the founder's background and should have waited until they had a product that was not going to let people down as much as it did.
@Anon I don't think anyone (including myself!) was expecting a Picasso out of the gates, but speaking as someone who loves tinkering with new apps I was really, really disappointed. Think a lot of people will agree with me it was too big of a push for what they launched.
I've been using the app in London since the launch. I had a brief moment of excitement at a big concert on Friday when one other person there was using the same app, but I was too busy enjoying the gig to really care that much. The rest of the time I'm just sending photos into the void with no response or contact. Hardly social, and I still don't really understand the UI.
I hope it succeeds, but I'm afraid if they don't pull their finger out sharpish, it will lose the interest of even the most patient users.
I was utterly perplexed by the hieroglyphs that constitute the UI. There may be the seed of a good idea in here, but they've got lost in their own hyperbole and it comes across as style over substance. As the americans say, a case of "drinking your own kool-aid".
Looks like a pretty typical startups story: have a good idea leverage your contacts for funding, get a bunch of developers to scramble to get your app built, hopefully one will know how to use Photoshop, do your PR yourself, lean heavily on buzz from SXSW and social networks, brag about changing the face of inter-personal communications, wait as massive amounts of people download your app and the media begins to review it. Only then do you realize that you should have also hired a user experience guy.
There's no such thing as bad PR, if you're trying to stake a brand claim on a commonly used English world ("color").
Any coverage that establishes the association between app and brand is good, even if UX expectations are temporarily, but reversibly, lowered.
If an app has potential for PR backlash on privacy and copyright, then a temporary association with "poor UX" and "no users in my town" is a net PR improvement. UX can be fixed. User rejection on the grounds of privacy, security or commercial use of user-generated photos would be less reversible.
This was the first app I learned about from a physical newspaper, rather than online or social media. Kudos to the PR team.