Sexy Companion Product Strategy
I wrote this post an year ago. Sometimes I feel it like a PR stund for Dexetra. Anyway I am republishing the post.
Do you remember the very first Siri’s competitor? A small android app that goes by the name Iris?
A few years ago in 2011, Apple released a brand new feature of the iPhone — Siri, a new digital personal assistant. The whole world was fascinated. Everybody watched in anticipation while waiting eagerly for a bite. However the Android world was engulfed in gloom. Without something that could stand up to Siri they would start loosing sales. So they waited in anticiaption, hoping that someone would develop an app to lift their gloom.
That is when a guy called Narayanan Babu from Dexetra created a small voice commanding app called Iris. Add to it the fact that this was build in just 8 hours in a hackathon enhanced its fame. Androidans took to Iris in a frenzy. They finally had something that could stand up to Siri.
Iris though was never a real competitor to Apple. It uses the default speech to text function to understand voice commands. Also Siri performed far better than Iris.
So why the initial hype that surrounded Iris? I would say it was the technology hype. Personal assistant technology was the gleaming symbol at the time and there was need for a personal assistant in Android. Dexetra smartly used this to their advantage. The company built around the hype and marketed Iris accordingly.
They never did have any plans for further development in it. But it acted as a launching pad for their next app, Friday, a personal diary and assistant. And more importantly, Iris helped bring in investment from huge firms like Sequoia and Qualcomm.
It is not easy for an Indian company like Dexetra to be noticed in Silicon Valley. They were not from Bangalore. They started from a small city, Cochin in Kerala. (They moved to Bangalore only later.) So they got better publicity for their company and eventually for their next app, Friday.
I would call this kind of marketing strategy — Companion Product Marketing Strategy. These kind of marketing tactics are essential when you don’t have a sexy product that can attract immediately thousands of users.
So when you don’t have an attractive product, you build a sexy product that consumes less resources that will then market your company and also generate sales for your main product. Dexetra employed both tactics. They built Iris and got publicity, mainly due to the hype created in Android by the entry of Siri in iPhone. They received good initial publicity, free of cost and even found place in leading tecnology magazines like Techcrunch, Thenextweb etc. They built a brand value to a company, attracting investment to the tune of thousands of dollars. This further helped in marketing their next product.
Benefits from the companion product strategy is that you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on initial publicity or hire a PR firm. This is helpful especially to start-ups since they tend to be low on cash at the initial stages. Most enterprise applications are not free. Offering free companion product ensure large number of customers knowing about it. These customers can then be guided to your main product, to whom it can be sold.
Lesson learned? Next time you build a non sexy product, build a sexy companion. And make you marketing life easier.
I don’t have any relationship with Dexetra. I found these facts from news papers and technology blogs.