Everybody knows about The Placebo Effect™.

That's what happens when you think you're taking a medicine that will help you, and it does help you—but it turns out that it was a sugar pill, not a medicine at all.

It was discovered by a clever, desperate nurse during World War II. She was running out of morphine to give an injured soldier, so she lied. She told him he was getting drugs, but he was really getting saltwater.

And it worked.

Before the Redesign

So you've got this product. So I've got this product.

It's totally unique, the only entry in its field, and everybody knows it. It's a rookie entry into an extremely crowded (if not particularly well-differentiated) field. Almost nobody knows it exists.

This article came up on my linkdar recently: Future Practice Interview: Bill Scott
. (I don't know why its title is so un-explanatory.)

The interviewer (Lou Rosenfeld) talks to Bill Scott, who heads up "interface engineering" at Netflix.

The $64,491 question

Lou asks the driving question of the interview (from my viewpoint, anyway): "What do engineers wish designers understood?"

Jon Trelfa writes in with a nerd dilemma as old as time. Or at least as old as the goddamn "web 2.0" moniker.

I've tried the "if you build it, they will come" model and thus far my great-idea has been sitting with zero hits. I've done the SEO stuff to increase ranking as well; still nothing.

I think there's more to launching a site than just building and SEO - what else would you recommend to help "launch" a website/product more quickly?