Sam Soffes

Value of Beta

Posted on

I thought I had decided against doing betas of software to more than just close friends. A few friends assured me that most feedback would be useless. Their point as most just wanted to get it early to feel cool but didn’t actually use it or send feedback. I can definitely say for iOS betas in the past, this has been my experience as well.

The Whiskey beta has been great. I have a huge amount of things to build still. My list was a little overwhelming. Among things that still need to be built, there were lots of little bugs that needed some attention I’ve been putting off. No one likes to fix bugs.

Getting lots of email and tweets from people saying they love it and can see its potential is huge. People actually seeing it is good motivation. It also helps get me excited to fix little bugs. For example, several people reported this one thing that took me a minute to fix. I had just been forgetting about it because it wasn’t something I used a lot personally.

I’m a fan of showing your work early. I wish I would have done it sooner. Now I just need to finish this thing and ship it!


Checkout the Whiskey beta, this markdown text editor I'm working on for Mac and iOS.