Closed vs Open Beta
I see a lot of startups that are in closed beta for a very long period nowadays.
(Not sure but feel like closed beta became even more trendy after Superhuman)
Which is your choice? and why?
I chose an open beta to get more feedback but it's incredibly much harder to get replies than I imagined!
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unless you have a disrupting idea, in a very competitive market, that would be easy to steal (which is usually very unlikely), be as open as possible. Getting users is already hard enough. Plus, today most startups and products adopt the "build in public" type of approach in order to attract more users.
Thank you for your opinion Francesco! Startups are very quick in following how others became successful. "Building in public" might be the next "closed beta"
It depends on what you want to drive.
Usually, if you're building a product like Superhuman that improves efficiency, or creating a new category a closed beta helps in building a tight feedback loop with your early users.
I'm building Wonderpath (https://www.wonder-path.com/) and we're in closed beta in order to figure out how to build a self-service scalable onboarding into the product. Moreover, this also allows us to control who gets access to the platform and build our user personas.
An open beta is helpful if you are looking for more quantitative data and have a good stream of weekly/monthly sign-ups and are ok to have a leaky funnel.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Wonderpath looks cool! I will give it a try. :-)