Skylight · B2C · digital family calendars and frames
Push marketing spend on a new calendar product before the product was good
Didn't work; nearly killed the product; took off only after product fixes in fall 2022
Failedpaid-socialfeature-development
What they did
Calendar shipped November 2018 as a quick launch; the deep software was hard to build and under-resourced. In 2021-22 they 'gunned marketing' on it. It failed, and they considered killing Calendar. Lesson: until the product is around 40 NPS, marketing spend gives a false negative because you can't tell whether marketing or product is the problem. After investing in the product, Calendar took off in fall 2022.
What happened
Marketing 'just sucked'; they nearly shut Calendar down. Calendar took off in fall 2022 after the product improved.
- Stage
- Calendar, 2021-2022
- Effort
- Marketing push across 2021 and 2022
“And we gunned marketing in '21 and '22, revved the engine and it just sucked. It didn't work. And we thought about killing the product.”
“if your product isn't like a solid 40 NPS, I think marketing effort and dollars are a waste of time, because you're going to get a false negative.”
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