Marketing A Physical Product Like A Web App (WhiteyBoard on Wired)

Here's my quick review of the whiteyboard:

After seeing the techcrunch review climb the HN front page a couple months back, I convinced my office to buy two of the 4' x 6' Berthas. I left the actual ordering up to my office manager. Five days after ordering, we still hadn't received our order so we called the folks at whiteyboard who told us that they must have lost our order. So we ordered again, they apologized for the inconvenience, and we were told it would be there within the week. A week passed and still no whiteyboard. We called the whiteyboard guys and they told us, sorry, but your order is stuck in customs. We apologize for the wait, but we'll get your order to you as soon as possible. So about 3 weeks later, our whiteyboards arrived. Drumroll please....

We put up the whiteyboard last week. There's a reason they don't show the Bertha in their demo video. It took 3 of us to put that monster up. After we got all the bubbles out, I wrote on it with the dry erase and tested her out. Writing on a whiteyboard is, as you would expect, exactly the same as writing on a white board. Next, I took the dry erase eraser to erase what I had just written. This works ok, but not as well as a regular white board. The dry erase smudges a lot more on the whiteyboard and you're left with a tint of whatever color you had just written in. A slightly dampened paper towel takes care of this though.

Each day I come in the office, the edges of the whiteyboard are slightly peeled away and there are a few bubbles in the middle of it to iron out so this can get a bit annoying, especially if there is stuff written on it that you don't want to erase.

Aside from the ordering snafu, I would say that the folks at the office seem to think the product is ok. Since I'm the youngest in the office, I have jokingly been dubbed the "whiteyboard guy" so I get a lot of shit for all its little quirks. My fallback retort is that we paid 10% of what a comparably sized white board costs and it still gets the job done. And even though it seems slightly ghetto at times, that's what matters, right?

They need to add a 4th product option: her phone number.