Viewfinder from Connected Flow — The Twitter Launch

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:14:18 -0800

One of the thoughts I had in starting this blog was to discuss what other indie companies are doing in the realm of marketing. Some companies are very much "into" the concept of marketing; others tend to treat marketing as an annoyance that they can't be bothered with (even though they are at least doing some minimal marketing by having a website).

Today, Connected Flow launched Viewfinder. With all the material fresh, I thought I would point out some of the cool marketing things that I noticed Fraser & co. do. Also, Fraser is a great guy, so I'm happy to shine a bit of attention on his app.

Salting: This is the pre-launch phase where you build up excitement (thirst) for a product. Fraser has been doing this for a while. On Twitter, Fraser (as himself and, occasionally from the @connectedflow account) was mentioning "[FLOWDACTED]" for quite a while, at least since August if not before. That built up curiousity in the developer and power-user community. Just before Halloween, he leaked (again, via Twitter) the name of the app and hinted that it would be launching soon. Early this week, he created a twitter account @viewfinderapp and started tweeting hints about what the application does. By launch day today, a lot of people in the developer/power-user community had heard about Viewfinder through Twitter.