I spotted an intriguing tweet from @Psychobel…
…and the BBC story led me to the Beautiful People site, where I (of course) clicked on this link…
…where this apology appeared:
IMPORTANT INFORMATION: BeautifulPeople.com has launched globally. The launch is being extensively covered by the global media. The huge media coverage is currently generating so much traffic on our servers that we have had to limit some users from using the site. We are sorry for the inconvenience. We’re excited to welcome you, so please check back later.
So, who came up with the global launch plan for this?
It’s not about whether somebody failed to think about what would happen if the launch was “extensively covered by the global media”, because that would surely be one of their goals. Who wouldn’t expect a site that promised ‘beautiful people’ to each other, worldwide, to be somewhat interesting to the human race?
The problem here is that somebody didn’t get the underlying engineering of a website in place that could accomodate the interest they were surely trying to generate.
If you plan to be successful, you’ll plan to generate interest. Don’t forget to plan to be able to follow through on the interest you generate. If that’s going to be done by your website, don’t skimp on the engineering behind the scenes.
Or you’ll potentially expose your new idea to worldwide ridicule.
About Matthew Goldsbrough
I’ve spoken to some folks who’ve had launches hit by server failures and (at least in their case) it certainly wasn’t intentional.
Sure, you might get an extra bump in publicity from the story about your server failing. It might let you send an extra launch email out to catch those who didn’t come originally.
But the reality is that your hottest prospects on any launch are the ones that come first. And if you can’t service them – either taking their money or getting their email – then you may have lost your hottest prospects forever. That’s rarely worth the extra PR or later visitors.
Ian
Noting how much publicity this got, a colleague in the marketing world tells me he wonders whether this was accidental, or a stroke of marketing genius. He says that the jury’s still out as far he is concerned.
I’m sticking with it being a failure to think through their plan.