The web 2.0 world is use to public betas. A company builds a product, makes it live, starts promoting it and polishes things on the way (on the way to where).
Its a good approach, but sometimes it might be painful for users. You can allow this to happen if you have a strong brand that has an army of raving fans. This practice allows you the ability to make mistakes. We operate conservatively and don't want our customers or ourselves to experience any hardships, so we adopted a different concept.
Wrike.com is already live, but we did not publish any news about the product yet and will not at least for the next few months. We will use this breathing space to fix the bugs, stabilize the product and add some handy details, which shift the application from good to great.
We will also slowly invite people to join the community of Wrike early users and let us know their thoughts. And when they feel that the product is great, they will start to invite their friends making the evolutionary transition from semi-public to public.
How do you like this approach?
