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:
November 6th, 2005 at 8:36 am
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.
November 8th, 2005 at 10:14 pm
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.