“Just do it” – probably one of the best taglines ever – is applicable to a lot of situations, but it’s especially apropos for startup founders. Once you’ve gotten your MVP all squared away, how do you know it’s time to pull the trigger? So I asked DCTech founders,
When did you know it was time to stop beta testing and/or giving away your product?
We started out charging for our product, but then realized that it wasn’t scalable. I think we’re a unique case, but you always should look at various examples and then see what makes the most sense for your business. That’s not always what’s trending at the time. We also did a very short beta test. You’re always going to be iterating, so often beta testing doesn’t make sense. But again, we always have done what makes the most sense for our business, so I always recommend that.
- Marty Cornish, EasyPaint
I haven’t had this discussion with many other startups, so I don’t know if we are the exception or the norm on this. For us, it was a total weaning process. Betas are safe. They allow you to make mistakes and the end user (typically) accepts and acknowledges this because, well, you are in beta. Once the safety net is gone, all understanding and acceptance is out the window. It is really hard to let that safety net go.
If I had to go back, I would most likely been more definitive in stopping cold turkey with the beta testing. We let it drag on for some time. And not that it wasn’t a good idea to allow it to continue – we were able to gain a significant amount of first hand user experience, but it certainly didn’t help our bottom line.
With that said, I am currently still giving away free membership to the site.
- LaToria Brent, NextBrides
The product was stable. Our beta customers were happy. Didn’t make sense to give away the service for free any more.
- Aneet Makin, LegCyte
For us our “beta test” was our event at TJ. We didn’t realize this would be something bigger until just before the event when Pulak Mittal from UPenn’s Pennapps hackathon reached out to us about doing one in Philly.
- Mayank Jain, Pilot
I had two “beta” clients before I officially launched, and then once I did, no more freebies. I did gradually raise my prices, though, so I started my first few clients at half price before I implemented my real pricing. It’s taken me some time to realize that I need to value my time and charge enough for it. People equate price with value, which is sometimes sad, but it is true.
- Erika Ettin, A Little Nudge
While it’s easy to fall into the mindset that you can’t launch until you have a perfect product, it’s an impossible goal – this was a concept I really struggled with and probably kept us in the beta testing mode about a month longer than we really needed. Once I got over the desire for perfection and instead changed my mindset to asking whether we were good enough to provide the level of customer service and quality we needed in order to succeed, we moved forward with our official launch.
We were giving away “friends and family” discounts for the first couple months that we were in business to encourage people to try our concept and give us honest feedback. Of course, our clients during that time period were, actually, friends and family. We moved away from that model once we started getting business from complete strangers (not family, not friends, and not a friend of a friend).
- Janice Gambaccini, LendABox
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