This past weekend we decided that our first beta is going to be private. This led me to really look into the difference between a public beta and a private beta. What are the pros and cons of each. In the past, many web apps declared a “private beta” because they were still buggy or not built to scale. But although we have worked hard to address bugs and put in place structures to continuously deploy for scale, as a B2B we were concerned that opening our first product to the public and critics would inhibit our ability to finish the product per the vision.
We at Bimotics didn’t call our first sellable product an alpha either. Through favorable circumstances we have a customer who is willing to pay to use our software. It really didn’t seem right to have a selling alpha product, so private beta made more sense. What sets this private beta apart from conventional thinking also is that our beta is not just missing certain features on our product roadmap. Rather, there is still more to build before it is truly a subscription based analytics service for small business.
Other considerations taken in the decision to launch the private beta include the amount of customer support we could provide while continuing to develop our project, and more obviously, being able to preserve and defend the intellectual property awhile bit longer. As the small business is our target market, we have know that providing a strong level of support will be key to making sure our customers continue to use the software but getting the positive word of mouth out to others.
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