Early Exclusivity Fosters Later Empires

Exclusive isn’t just for elitism

If you invite only a select group to your early service you are following the golden product release path. Who you invite in to a pre-alpha stage can have a profound impact on your business direction. Limited early invites creates a sense of scarcity. This scarcity is not completely unreasonable as you can only respond to so much user feedback at the start of a new company.

At this early product phase a small community of people that care about your effort will socially mold the style, utility, and personality of your groups design efforts. By getting healthy feedback from the getgo you can face the biggest challenges to adoption while your service is most flexible. Older products have built in limitations on usage, as their design lifecycle was targeted towards a specific function. While older utility libraries are a great way to hit the ground running, the character and charm of a novel product is:

  • it’s unique combination of existing products or services
  • it’s a genuine new fundamental offering
  • it’s an older concept that now is ripe for marketing

Game designers have thrown private alpha parties for some time now. A plethora of web service businesses have released limited access codes at domain conferences. The early users require some functionality, but do your best to eliminate bugs immediately. While some may forgive early software bugginess, many will simply move on to more functional, and reliable alternatives.

Who to invite?

If you select the private testing group properly expect better feedback and greater enthusumiasm and product support. The target test group should consist of industry experts, friends who can be brutally honest, and other potential users you believe would benefit most from your service. Random test groups are only good at giving average feedback. Most random sample groups have little motivation to provide any helpful feedback.

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  • http://shanacarp.com/essays ShanaC

    I'm going to post on friendfeed about why this actually not fully a good idea. I product test (sort of) as a hobby/way of getting a job/ way of understanding how businesses work.

    One of the things I take cursorily looks at, but for the most part ignore, because I have no choice until I get really specialized training in parts of the internet, is the way certain disabilities will perceive the web.

    Having a private party of lovers means you are going to miss groups who are going to be critical, especially those groups who have needs that are not going to be met. Getting those groups involved, even privately as specialized third parties as part of the funding agreements between VCs and startups (there is no way the vast majority of startups could fund this, and it would be better to do this sort of testing in batches and walk away with recommendations) would
    A) change the way the web looks and feels a lot
    B) bring in a lot of new jobs
    C) open up a whole new population to parts of the web that are not there to them.

    Just sayin'

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Good points. There's no reason why folks with disabilities couldn't be on a selected very early user list. For products that can be personalized towards people with specialized needs that makes perfect sense.

    But with a wide open test pool, the attention you can give each user is very limited. In addition widely conflicting views or specialized groups will essential cancel each others opinions out.

    You can't please all the people all the time.

  • http://shanacarp.com/essays ShanaC

    I'm going to post on friendfeed about why this actually not fully a good idea. I product test (sort of) as a hobby/way of getting a job/ way of understanding how businesses work.

    One of the things I take cursorily looks at, but for the most part ignore, because I have no choice until I get really specialized training in parts of the internet, is the way certain disabilities will perceive the web.

    Having a private party of lovers means you are going to miss groups who are going to be critical, especially those groups who have needs that are not going to be met. Getting those groups involved, even privately as specialized third parties as part of the funding agreements between VCs and startups (there is no way the vast majority of startups could fund this, and it would be better to do this sort of testing in batches and walk away with recommendations) would
    A) change the way the web looks and feels a lot
    B) bring in a lot of new jobs
    C) open up a whole new population to parts of the web that are not there to them.

    Just sayin'

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

    Good points. There's no reason why folks with disabilities couldn't be on a selected very early user list. For products that can be personalized towards people with specialized needs that makes perfect sense.

    But with a wide open test pool, the attention you can give each user is very limited. In addition widely conflicting views or specialized groups will essential cancel each others opinions out.

    Remember Facebook started providing a service to an exclusive group. Only Harvard students were allowed to join when Mark Zuckerberg started the service, then gradually it opened up to additional universities, and now anyone over 13years of age can join.

    You can't please all the people all the time.

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