Some startups release their beta versions as soon as they are done with the landing page and corporate e-mail. This is one way to go about it.
Some startups wait and polish their apps so they are almost too good to be called ‘beta’. It’s the other way.
And it was our way.
When the time comes to publicize your work — the precious little app that has been on your mind for months, years or maybe even forever — it hurts.
There are too many scary things to deal with when letting in new users.
People who look at your app without your love and passion. In your mind you probably even start calling them names:
Users. Judgers. Haters.
Dealing with first-time users can be refreshing or devastating — it depends on the crowd that signed up to try your product. And that depends on the places where you announced your app and looked for testers. It’s always connected. But if you did your homework and gathered people that are actually your target, the new users will offer just the kind of relief you needed. New users are simply great: they see those tiny things you’ve never considered important, they send you print screens and comments, they do better PR on their social media profiles than the actual PR done by the professionals you hired and go a step further by introducing your app to their friends.
If you’ve got an application worthy of their time.
Do you?
We’re back to the the biggest question and fear of every app developer — is my app good enough?
Will they use it? Will they love it? Is it worthy of being shown to the world already? Maybe we should add just this little tool or a few final adjustments to the tutorial? How about we wait another week or month to make sure that everything is like it supposed to be…?
Do you have any idea when your app will be good enough to release it?
If you’re still reading, then you already know, the answer is probably never. But you should release it anyway. And if you don’t trust us — (we barely know each other, right? And this is just something you’re reading on the internet, for Pete’s sake, you should be suspicious) you can always blame that decision on Master Yoda: “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”
We can tell you that we’ve waited, polished, fixed thousands of bugs and added even more new ones. And when the day finally came to send out our beta invitations we were still clueless. The same questions over and over again:
Will they like it? Is it any good? Is it really the best time for the release?
Don’t try to make it perfect — you’ve already done everything you could, so now it’s time to get some feedback!
We announced the release of our beta on our twitter and company blog just to stop making excuses and finally show it to others:
And you know what? They did join us.
Our users are maybe not as many as we’d like to have (who doesn’t want to have 1.000.000. devoted users the first day after launch?), but not as few as we feared (that would be a big, round zero). And they are priceless.
We love those people.
They give us notes, they make us print screens with arrows, colors and question marks, and they spend their precious time just to let us know what they think about our application.
Finally releasing our app, even though we still have a few things to improve, was the best decision ever.
