A good laugh is the perfect remedy for misery, so here is the story of our latest product launch a.k.a. How to End 3 Months of Hard Work on a "Revolutionary Product" with a Major Face Plant ;) 

It all Started With the Idea of the Century: Illico 

To give you a bit of background, our startup, lollicode, has been around for 3 years, and came up with a few products in various fields, the most publicly succesfull one being twitscoop (>500k UV, >2M PV per month, 750k registered users, quite a few acquisition offers which we turned down, and decent revenues). So not 10's of millions of $ success, but still satisfying at our level.

On a regular basis, we do a bit of brainstorming to come up with a project we like, and that we think is going to be a huge success and make us tons of fame and money.

We've become used to call it the Idea of the Century.

Not.

Anyway before Christmas, after our usual 2 hours lunch (after all, we're French), our beer-fed brains came up with this idea that chat on mobile phone was crap. All the apps out there (hello whatsapp, groupme, facebook chat!) required you to sign up to some sort of social network, have all your friends install the app, and were based on notifications, which anybody following a few people on twitter or facebook will agree are becoming a nuisance and receive less and less of our attention every day.

So we decided that we'd create a chat app that would eliminate the friction identified above, with the following features:

- Free app

- No sign-up

- Would work even if recipients didn't have the app installed

- Would be based on notifications by SMS, which is the most efficient way to get people's instant attention

We also added a few bells and whistles like the ability to start the chat with a photo and map in order to provide context to the conversation.

If you want to check it out, it's called Illico (and is available for free on the App Store) - I have attached a small slideshow of screenshots below.

We thought the use cases would be multiple, ranging from having fun on a chat with friends through organising a lunch or party, through to asking for advice during a shopping session. We were convinced the app was simple enough and adressed a real need (essentially the lack of "reply all" ability on SMS).

It took us about 3 months to develop (not full time).

Marketing Phase 1: Anybody Out There?

Still warm and fuzzy with the relatively good coverage we received on twitscoop over the years, we decided that we would use the same strategy for press coverage of Illico. 

That is to say no strategy, really.

Just drop a mail to tips@rww/techcrunch/mashable/etc... with a short pitch for the app, and a few screenshots attached, and forget about it because after all, our app was the Idea of the Century, and tech bloggers would love it.

We also sent the compulsory mail/tweet to Robert Scoble, who replied he couldn't test our app because he was extremely busy in Vegas (Being denied entry to a Microsoft party. Not. Boy that was exciting). 

And we waited. 5 hours. 12 hours. 24 hours.

Three days.

We looked at the logs and saw no sign of activity. We were a bit worn out by the late night work we had to put into finishing the app, and to be honest it didn't register right away.

And then it struck us: tech bloggers didn't give a fawck about our app. We don't even know if they read our email, but I bet they didn't. The title read something like "Illico brings reply all to SMS". Does it actually mean something? I bet it doesn't. Or if it does, no one cares.

Bottom line is, what worked 3 years ago simply doesn't anymore, because tech blogs are overwhelmed with press releases and calls. And our ridiculous email was never going to make it through.

A good strategy would probably have been to fly to SF, and try to show our app to people in person. Or I could have impersonated Kevin Rose. After all he managed to get his grunt - errr oink - app to be downloaded by 100k users in a week. An app where you rate burritos and see your friends do the same. An app where you need to register and that you need to pull out to take pictures of pork chops. For Christ's sake.

Marketing Phase 2: Fuck the US Tech Blogs, Let's Try Our Own Market

Slightly disappointed with our face plant in the famous land of opportunities, we decided to try our luck in our home market, i.e. the land of stripped shirts, berets, bicycles and baguettes.

Being very good at not learning from our past failures, we sent the French version of our email to French tech blogs. The title read something along the lines of "Illico brrrrings rrreply all to SMS".

With some screenshots attached.

And we waited for another three days.

26 downloads later, I can confidently say our product launch was a double face plant. If there is a mashable award for best face plant for a product launch, we'd nominate ourselves immediately.

Now I'm off for our weekly 2 hour lunch, and I'm sure we'll come up with a new Idea of the Century.

In the meantime, maybe you will download our app, or tweet the link to this post, or upvote it in HN - who knows, a major tech blog might take notice, and we'll inaugurate a new type of marketing ;)

And in a week's time we'll issue a press release to celebrate our 27th download!

Thanks for reading, and best of luck for your own projects!