Day 33: Open Beta!

status

No Feedback Friday today because I only have a little bit of time in a random cafe in Venice Beach and my Internet connection would be faster if I personally trained a pigeon to deliver handwritten notes with 1’s and 0’s.

I released Hide Feed v1.4.8 yesterday, and it included several major updates:

  • Usage stats are now visible
  • Reddit is now supported
  • Most importantly, Hide Feed is now in open beta!

Hide Feed entering open beta means that instead of having hidefeed.com directing people to a form where they need to join a waitlist to get a link to install Hide Feed, they can go straight to the Chrome Web Store to install Hide Feed.

The product feels solid enough to start having people install and use it without me manually emailing them the install link so it feels like the right time to exit private beta, but there’s still quite a bit to be done before it feels ready for a bona fide launch.

I guess this is a soft launch? The difference between open beta/soft launch and a “real launch” feels pretty blurry because the product is publicy available in both cases, but the way I’m thinking of it is that I’m not yet going to start marketing Hide Feed or post it on Product Hunt/Hacker News/etc. because of the remaining tasks to complete.

About 3 weeks ago on Day 10, I wrote about how launching feels so far away and listed a bunch of things I still needed to complete. I’ve implemented all of the required items (billing and being able to upgrade using license keys) and even one of the nice-to-have features of being able to upload your own images. I’m going to freeze the current feature set (I’m tempted to add support for Hacker News, Product Hunt, and a bunch of other websites, but not going to do that just yet) and just focus on fixing bugs until launching, which now feels pretty close.

Here are all the required items before launching:

Extension

  • Fix bugs

Website

  • Add a pricing page to the website (right now, it only lives inside the extension)
  • Update all screenshots to reflect latest product changes
  • Better assets (logo, demo video, open graph images, etc.) so my stuff doesnt look like ass

Other

  • Get more reviews on the Chrome Web Store for credibility
  • One more round of user testing (at least 3 people)

There are several items that I’m not sure if they’re actually required / want to think more about before proceeding:

  • Fraud prevention

    On Day 16, I wrote about how people can get Pro features forever without paying, and I’m not sure whether to implement a system to prevent this before launching.

  • Analytics

    Because I currently don’t include any analytics or telemetrics in Hide Feed, I wouldn’t know how often the fraud cases occur. There are also other questions that I’d like to be able to answer (e.g. “what % of users disable usage stats?”) that’d give me a better idea of how people use Hide Feed and what they want, but I’ve been reluctant to include analytics because it’s a lot easier to demonstrate that you take privacy seriously if you can say “Absolutely none of your data is transmitted” vs. “Some usage data is transmitted, but it’s anonymized, and you can read this privacy policy (which we both know you probably won’t read) if you want to understand exactly what is being transmitted and why”. I don’t want to take the decision to add analytics lightly because it opens the temptation to collect a lot more information than needed in the name of “understanding users”.

Man, my brain is fried and I’m having a hard time focusing so that’s all for today. Yay for open beta!