If I …Were in Alpha
I didn’t say If I was an Alpha, because if you know me, we already know that I’m an Alpha. And if there’s a greek letter they discover someday that comes before Alpha, I’m that too. If I had a company in Alpha mode, I’d take some steps to make tactical moves to ensure I didn’t have a near-certain death by moving into Beta before it’s ready.
So many companies, so little room in the market? Must.move.lighting.fast.always? Must throw it out there and fix it later? In the past several months I’ve seen companies go flying out the door before the products are fully baked. Ideas are never fully baked and online products are never done; as we all know, they simply evolve (if we’re lucky). But the belief in an ever-growing product isn’t the same as putting out a product to the public that isn’t ready.
If I were running product at a company that is in Alpha (even if it called itself in Beta), I would:
1. Withhold any and all traffic growing measures. If you’ve got a product that requires UGC in order to hammer out bugs, load test and populate pages then call your mother, your jobless cousins and your husband’s golf buddies. This isn’t the time to open up to random people. The web is simply too small now for that. Be clever about how to use the people you know. It’s old school, I know, but there’s a new reason: Real-Time Reporting. No longer do pages disappear. Everything now is available in real-time and opening up beta can produce half-completed pages, logins that spin, dead-end links or “this is where the ugly picture of yo baby goes” engineer placeholders. It’s just not worth it. Keep your content close and your content users closer.
2. Stop. Collaborate and Listen. Okay, fine, I’m stealing the line from Vanilla Ice and that’s just wrong. But he’s right. If you’re thinking of rolling into Beta do yourself a favor and stop everything. Take a breather. Take a weekend. Go back to your drawing board, away from the specs, away from the fancy UI corners and remember the product’s vision. Are you there? Are you there so strongly that you could push the product into Beta and go to sleep tonight not running MySql queries in your sleep? Have you listened to your team? Where’s the biggest worry? Is it valid? Is it a showstopper? Do you want to push to beta to get the Board off your back? To meet an arbitrary deadline? Take the moment. Stop. Collaborate. Listen.
3. Do not work any social media campaigns. No matter what. Sure, secure your FB fan page, get a Twitter account, play FourSquare, write a blog. But and this is a big but (not a big butt, which is a totally different rap song), do not waste the time or investment of a user when you are not yet ready to reciprocate. What can you offer users when you are not yet there yourself? Don’t tell me “Something Big is Coming!” because that’s not communicating with me. If you must engage social media into your pre-Beta plan, be completely transparent about your work. Tell a story of troubles and problems and issues and be fully prepared to offer the same kind of comfort in return to people you’re communicating with. The only thing I can honestly tell you to do in social media is LISTEN — comment on sites that matter to your business, pull in RSS feeds of sites that inspire your product and engage with them. Learn from them. But putting out a social media brand message takes dedication that Alpha products don’t have. Do you have it to give? If you don’t, save yourself the need of hiring me to fix the brand image and simply don’t engage until you are fully ready to put your best foot forward.
My bottom line is, don’t put up crap — your awesome idea is worth waiting a bit longer before taking it to Beta.
Note: Please give me some knuckles that I didn’t call out the names of the companies that led the inspiration for this post. <<good for me!>>
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