(2005-07-15) Jotspot Product Fragmentation

Dan Farber on JotSpot's Product Management fragmentation strategy. Reminds me of the BaseCamp/BackPack/TadaList cluster.

Some nice things about this approach:

• provides simpler Story Telling for each nicheProduct - a single "hook"

• you get people comfortable with the one dimension that they're most interested in, then some subset of them are ready to add more complementary features and you move them up to a fuller offering

• you get deeper market feedback on specific features

• if you really manage them as separate products you can roll out change ideas to a single niche, see what works, refine it, etc. before rolling it out into the integrated environment. The downside is that you can waste a lot of time managing similar-but-different forks...

Sept28'2005 - JotSpotLive has been launched as a separate One Page Wiki offering. Calling it "SubEthaEdit for the web" is an oversimplification, but that's probably the quickest way to wrap your head around the concept.... It's built with Ruby On Rails and uses AJAX to allow dragging and dropping of text around the screen.