Nope. Sit Down And Do The Work.
“We need (random marketing or UX project) done. Why don’t we copy how (tech company z) did it?”
It’s a common way to come up with a solution to a problem you’ve never solved before. Just copy how another admirable company solved the problem. There’s no need for data analysis or user research. While this is expedient, it’s not a sound longterm decision.
Copying a piece of someone else’s solution is like running your car on parts from other people’s cars. If your needs are very similar to the company you are copying, then you’ll likely be fine. If they’re not, you’ll solve one set of problems while creating others. Compound this strategy over time, and you’ve ended up creating a bunch of problems you could have avoided had you just done things right the first time. So much for the value of deadlines.
Let’s take a homepage as an example. Imagine you would like to copy GitHub’s homepage. You like it because you’re a developer, and it speaks to you:
Here are the factors you would want to consider before copying this page:
The top of GitHub’s marketing funnel is large, and is highly motivated to purchase.
How many people heard about GitHub for the first time at github.com? Probably not very many. GitHub spends a lot of money and effort building their community. Many people first see GitHub when they are invited to use it by current users. GitHub also spends a ton of money on t-shirts, stickers, hoodies, and various other forms of swag. They send their employees all over the world to give talks, and many have very popular blogs and social media profiles. They used to have drink ups all the time. So by the time you’ve hit github.com, someone has probably told you about it already.
If you copy this homepage design without building a community, you’ll likely not get as many signups as you think you should. You’ve done nothing to build enough trust to encourage a user to give you their information.
GitHub then does a lot of lifecycle marketing after this signup, which helps them build the bottom of the marketing funnel.
Once GitHub grabs your email, they send you a series of drip emails to onboard you. They A/B tested and painstakingly crafted a user experience and documentation for a variety of personas. They did significant user research for this process. So a person might not be “sold” when they put their email into the homepage, but eventually, GitHub works to sell them.
If you don’t have an onboarding flow that sells like this, implementing a similar homepage will likely collect a lot of info from people who end up paying you nothing. “Free” is not a marketing plan.
There is no substitute for passion and hard work.
How do I know that GitHub did all of this? Because the people who worked on these projects told me what they did. Here is the biggest difference I have found between tech companies who lead, and tech companies who follow: Leaders do the work. They perform user research, and make decisions based on data. They do the work because they are genuinely obsessed with solving a problem for people. In GitHub’s case, they were obsessed with making programming more collaborative.
It may seem like you don’t have the time to do the work. But do users have time to sort through your half baked ideas that were often ripped off from other companies? How is that supposed to work?
