63: Running Successful Early Access Programs

Description

Ben and Derrick were hoping to share a great conversation they had with author, designer, and consultant Paul Jarvis. But, without warning, all was lost when Paul’s audio for the episode could not be saved. The plan is to have Paul back on the show in a few weeks.

Everything else is going pretty well for Derrick, who provides an update on Level. He met his goal and launched the Level Early Access Program two weeks ago. When it comes to testing Tuple, Ben plans to prioritize people early on who have good bandwidth and help guide them to be successful when using the tool.

Today’s Topics Include:

Takeaway and Wake-up Call: Derrick has 6 teams in the early access program; some are using Level a lot, some are not - people are busy and running their own business
Quality feedback for Level testing; offers unknowns, guidance, and clarifications
Derrick’s working on a feature to make sure users remember to check back into Level because it’s designed to be unobtrusive and not bother you
Make a good first impression; capture users’ vision and maintain their interest
Derrick addressed people’s questions about how Level works and will solve their problems via storytelling with concrete, mechanical product details
Derrick is battling perfection, but wants to generate pre-order revenue and set a rolling launch deadline for Level - ideally in January, to highlight new tools in the new year
Ben is doing a podcast tour to promote Tuple, which had its best week for sign ups so far
Tuple also experienced a technical breakthrough - it crushed latency; trust your team to get things done
Tuple adventure is predicated on a value proposition that Tuple can be better than off-the-shelf products because of its key differentiators
Ben is not your everyday developer; recently took a leap and hit the bigtime being a backup singer for Josh Groban!

Links and resources:

Bits and Trees Podcast

Full Stack Radio Podcast

Ruby Testing Podcast

Bootstrapped Web Podcast