There are a lot of little products out there on the web these days. As someone who would enjoy entering such a market someday, swimming through what is already out there does something to dissuade me. There are plenty of public products I haven’t even tried, but the popular way to scale an application these days seems to be the “private beta.”
The process goes like this:
- Company makes an announcement about their great new product
- Company provides a spot to sign up with my email address for some future launch
- Go to 1
Now that time has passed, I’m getting all sorts of invites. Perhaps some of these companies gave themselves a November deadline? (Note to self: aim for mid-Month, mid-week, and heck, mid-day). In the past two days, I have received invites from:
At YackPack, we decided to go with a private beta for various reasons. One was to avoid any big disasters. So far, so good.
Note that our beta is not so private. You can get invited by a friend. Or you can go to our web page and sign up and now we invite you to get started fairly quickly.
BJ–You’re right. YackPack replied the same day with an invite. And there’s nothing wrong with any one of these products. But receiving three notices in one day made me wonder how I was going to find the time to give each a fair shot.