63: Running Successful Early Access Programs

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!