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When do you come out of beta?
by
Paul Richards
When do you come out of beta and start charging people for your product?
We actually do it today. We've been in open, public beta since 17th November. The access was free and all features were available.
Now we're introducing payments and we're starting selling. We'll see how it goes but the goals is to hit $1500 MRR by mid-February.
If you're curious, I'm talking about Raport
The pricing page looks good! The FAQ is especially helpful with the visual examples!
Thank you, I'm glad that we managed to make pricing look good. And that the FAQ is helpful. I really wanted to explain anything that could raise questions and doubts.
Congrats on launch, I wish you all the best :)
Thank you Paul :)
I asked friends & family to give seohero.net some serious load testing in production during beta to make sure it can handle the load. Friends and early beta users help identify some more bugs, after that I was confident enough to charge.
Knowledge base, technical list has robots.txt listed twice. Rest look unique.
We released an alpha build of Squeaky after 5 weeks, and then beta after 8 weeks. After that we've actually now kept it in Beta for 4 months whilst we learned as much as possible from the alpha and beta cohorts.
Generally speaking I do see the value of just releasing with no labels, but it really depends on the space you're entering and the type of users you need. In our case we're entering a competitive market with lots of big players, so we wanted to lower expectations whilst we were figuring things out, and attract the sort of users that want to help shape the product.
We're now confident our alpha and beta cohorts have helped us to create something quite special, so we'll remove the beta label next month when we introduce paid plans and a new website that better markets the product we've been creating.
We went live on 1st Aug 2020. No alpha, beta, or any other name. A very basic proposition. We had a few Volunteers and one customer if I recall.
We focused on building the Supply Side until end of Oct 2021. We now have 3,115 Volunteers. Now focusing on building the Demand Side
You can charge customers even before you have a product @paulrchds What's the URL for your product?
https://www.recall.wiki/
I have about 100 signups for my beta.
Struggling to get you product to work. I thought it would suck up content when a URL is added.
At the moment it doesn't get content from any URL. You can use the search bar to search for things your want to remember and then save them. It will automatically categorize it and link it to anything else you have saved that mentions the same thing.
Happy to hop on a call to give you a quick demo: https://calendly.com/recall_wiki/recall-demo
Signed up to see what's it all about.
Are you on Pioneer? I'm sure I came across your site recently.
Yeah I just joined on Monday.
There's some weird behavior with the "grows" "connected" etc gifs. If I scroll to their position on the page and wait, they start playing, but as soon as I scroll a little bit, they change back to the yellow word "grows" for example. Not sure if that's intended but due to that I couldn't take a good look at your product.
Thanks for letting me know. They are all videos and the intended behavior is that the video starts from the beginning when it scrolls into the viewport.
Could you please tell me what device you are on so I can try replicate the issue.
It's happening on Chrome and Firefox on both macOS, Windows, Android. If I were you I'd just make the videos autoplay anyway regardless of whether it's in viewport or not.
Most SaaS / apps I've seen these days are in beta when they don't have self-service signup and onboarding. IMO once the sign-up flow is self-service, I don't see the need to remain in beta, even with missing features.
If you have product for whcich you want to charge money try to do that ASAP. Also BETA sounds something which was a sign of pride back in 2008, companies even had the beta next to their logo to show off :)
I totally have that on my logo right now🤣
Even if the product has BETA on it, people still view it as a fully fledged product often, so this has a double-edged sword effect. When your testing the product BEFORE it goes live, people cut you a break. Once it is out in the wild...expect people to give real, honest feedback that can sometimes be tough.
Do you think the BETA next to a product is a sense of pride? Since 2010 or so, I haven't seen it used as much :)
Well its good to get honest feedback as soon at possible.
I said that it was cool back in 2008, not from 2008 so that means it was cool back then. Also my point was that having beta stage for product is not a good thing, build your product and start charging ASAP. So I kinda don't see what you are mocking here :)
As soon as the product can solve the problem.
If the value is still not significant, try to charge your customers. As soon as they pay you, you can clearly understand your product-market fit and the way to grow.
Recall.wiki does solve some problems (for me personally at least) but I have quite a lot of other features I was planning to add before trying to charge. I was going to do freemium model, but I will think about it a bit more. I guess there is nothing to loose trying to charge too early.