Closed beta or go for it?
My cofounder and I have been working on a B2B cloud security and compliance SaaS for about 4 months. We’re 1-2 months from launching and aren’t really sure what the right move is here. Should we try to do a closed beta and try to get a few users to work closely with and iterate on their feedback or just launch?
The concern with just launching is that at this point we only have about 20 in our mailing list and out of those maybe 5 to 10 are legitimate businesses. Also, we’re not sure what features are important and we’ve got a lot of options there. I think right now our strongest offering will be with compliance. I think we’ll either be a huge boon for companies that do SoC2 auditing or companies will use us to provide documentation and reports to their auditor.
We’re also back and forth quite a bit on the pricing model. If we launch without a closed beta we’re for sure going to have a free trial (14 days).
Anyone out there gone the closed beta route for B2B and can talk about their experience?
Hey Kevin,
Perhaps you could begin with your closed BETA and then do the launch?
Early users are so important and their feedback is valuable. If you do go the closed BETA path, it's always worth being mindful of building lots of features for a small number of users that aren't paying yet. We went down that path in the past and it turned out free users wanted very different things from our future paying customers :p
It sounds like you guys are on the right track, best of luck!
What a fantastic point! Indeed we may acquire a set of closed beta users that share little to no overlap in desires than paying users. I think perhaps we can mitigate this a little by doing a shorter closed beta period and trying to ensure the beta testers we get really have the problems we’re trying to solve.
Looking forward to following your updates and success here :)
We're not closed but we haven't put effort into launching yet. We are focused on usage exchanges and other routes to get feedback.
Our experience has been that a lot will change once you get more feedback and, in your case, burning more than one on your mailing list at a time would be a waste. We also wasted some time on the pricing model that now seems silly given how much refinement the product has undergone since. Early users should not be paying you anything - period.
Also we used our own product to get feedback from users - you are welcome to as well - for free.