Geek Marketing 201 - Don't Buy Our Product.


When I first saw Buglabs modular "computers", I had no real idea what they were but I knew that they were worth watching.

Then they won an innovation prize at CES and more people started paying attention. More impressive for me is that this uber-geeky business is not acting like a geek business. Here's their first sales announcement.

If this were 1997, this post would be chock full of blinking content as we announced our store's opening with pride. Instead, we'll be only slightly more subtle as we open the padlocks, and welcome you in to browse around. I want to take a moment to (and boy is this going to sound odd) potentially discourage certain shoppers:

For those of you who have ZERO programming experience, this isn't a great time to buy a BUG. It'd be like having a Web browser on your computer in 1988 (which would've been quite a feat, by the way): the platform works, but it doesn't have much going on. Right now, and for the next few months, our focus is building a developer community...

Now that's smart marketing. It recognises that a disappointed user is probably lost for good and that early adopters are not where the money is made. The geek content resides in the product - some people will care about it, most won't. It has no place in the marketing.

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