63: Running Successful Early Access Programs
November 15th, 2018
34 mins 26 secs
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About this Episode
Ben and Derrick were hoping to share a great conversation they had with author, designer, and consultant Paul Jarvis. But, without warning, all was lost when Paul’s audio for the episode could not be saved. The plan is to have Paul back on the show in a few weeks.
Everything else is going pretty well for Derrick, who provides an update on Level. He met his goal and launched the Level Early Access Program two weeks ago. When it comes to testing Tuple, Ben plans to prioritize people early on who have good bandwidth and help guide them to be successful when using the tool.
Today’s Topics Include:
- Takeaway and Wake-up Call: Derrick has 6 teams in the early access program; some are using Level a lot, some are not - people are busy and running their own business
- Quality feedback for Level testing; offers unknowns, guidance, and clarifications
- Derrick’s working on a feature to make sure users remember to check back into Level because it’s designed to be unobtrusive and not bother you
- Make a good first impression; capture users’ vision and maintain their interest
- Derrick addressed people’s questions about how Level works and will solve their problems via storytelling with concrete, mechanical product details
- Derrick is battling perfection, but wants to generate pre-order revenue and set a rolling launch deadline for Level - ideally in January, to highlight new tools in the new year
- Ben is doing a podcast tour to promote Tuple, which had its best week for sign ups so far
- Tuple also experienced a technical breakthrough - it crushed latency; trust your team to get things done
- Tuple adventure is predicated on a value proposition that Tuple can be better than off-the-shelf products because of its key differentiators
- Ben is not your everyday developer; recently took a leap and hit the bigtime being a backup singer for Josh Groban!
Links and resources:
Derrick Reimer Website
Derrick Reimer on Twitter
Ben Orenstein Website
Ben Orenstein on Twitter