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July 22, 2009
When does an Alpha become a Beta?
Today it seems like all web sites and web services start out as Beta. Some (can you say GMail) seem to stay in Beta FOREVER. You rarely see Alpha on anything. I have seen sites in “Beta” that totally don’t work and are missing major check the box features. There seems to be a wide variance on what people call Alpha, Beta and “live” software. In the Greek Alphabet, it goes Alpha, Beta, Gamma. Have you ever seen a software version in Gamma? Believe it or not, I have an opinion on all this.
Back in the old waterfall package software business, we used release numbers 1.0, 2.0, etc. Major releases were whole numbers, minor releases were fractions (.1, .2, etc.). In that world as a software consumer I had a policy to never use anything lower than 3.0. Remember Windows 1.0? It wasn’t until Windows for Workgroups (actually 3.1) that it actually worked more than it failed. With web sites, where you can upgrade very day, the lines are less clear. At Kashless.org, we update the live site 3-7 times a week. The traditional release numbering system would get crazy fast. Here is how we do it at Kashless.org.
When designing Kashless.org, we identified 12 major features which when added together would make the Kashless.org marketplace 10X better than existing marketplaces. So a version 1.0 of each of those 12 features is what the Alpha dev schedule included. My system for release of a web service is a four step process:
Private Alpha – This is the first version of your site that you want your friends to see. Put a password on it. Make people request an invite. This has LOTS of bugs, has only about 10-20% of the features you are planning to run. Limit this to < 500 people. 1-3 months. At Kashless.org we opened the private Alpha in January 2009.
Public Alpha – When the site is mostly stable and 20-30% feature complete, take the password off and let the public pound on it. If your site is geographical, limit the Alpha to one geography. Keep adding major features ever couple of weeks. Alpha should be 3-12 months depending on how much dev work you have. At Kashless.org we entered public alpha in late February 2009 for Seattle only.
Public Beta – When the site is feature complete with a version 1.0 of every major feature you hope to develop, you are done with the Alpha. The Beta is about getting users, expanding geographically and focusing on scalability. Beta should be between 6-24 months depending on how long it takes to get to scale. Kashless.org is going into Beta this week with the launch of Portland, New York, and Spokane.
Gamma – no qualifier – When you have whipped most of the scalability issues, have reached critical mass on users (whatever that is for you) and have a stable version 1.0 of every major feature you planned to build, you have a live, fully released product. Take all qualifiers off and just use your brand. You can of course add more features later and you don’t need to make revision notations.
So your initial feature set is your Alpha development work. The Alpha is for major feature development. The Beta is for scalability, usability and geographic expansion. That’s how we do it at Kashless.org.
Posted by Martin at 12:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 21, 2009
kashless.org begins national roll-out
logo on NASAQ reader board in Times Square. Yea…
still working on navigation UI, but be one of the first to check out
Posted by Martin at 4:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 1, 2009
New features over at Kashless.org and why they matter…
It has been awhile since I have posted about the new features we have been building at Kashless.org. The Krew has been heads down for the last two months. I have been saving up. Over the weekend we released all the new code.
Lets start with a review of some of the business problems Kashless.org is trying to solve for our members who post and search for free items.
Search and browse. There are multiple sites with free listings. Many sites lump all free into one category. Or they make you read every e-mail searching for what you want. Or subscribe to multiple lists. No easy way to browse free listings by category, neighborhood, city, distance from where you are, or have the system search for you.
Everything is done only in email. While I love my email client, it is a pretty blunt instrument with which to perform ecommerce. Giving and getting free stuff is ecommerce. That is why eBay, Amazon etal have lots of ways to do business with a browser based application.
User transparency is lacking. Many marketplaces today are anonymous or you only have an e-mail from someone. No context as to that person’s reputation, feedback in prior transactions, history, etc. When I am giving something away or going over to someone’s house to pick something up, I want to know something about who I am dealing with and have the software application help me establish trust.
Those aren’t the only problems we are solving, but some of the big ones. So lets check out some of the new KL Alpha features with this context.
Way better UI. The whole look and feel of the site has been re-designed by Krew member Jordan. Better colors, fonts, more intuitive navigation, standardized buttons, more tab, all the bells and whistles of a professionally designed consumer ecommerce web site.
New Browse tab. When you mouse over or click on the “Browse” tab, you now get a list of product categories and neighborhoods/towns to browse. With a count of how many items in each. So for example if you live on Queen Anne in Seattle and want to see how many free items are in your neighborhood, you now can.
Manage Conversation through the site. We have implemented a very sophisticated message handling system that now allows you to send and receive e-mails as you always do about free items, but a copy of each message is saved on the Kashless site. So now you can see all the messages relating to one of your listings in one place. You can respond to many people at once. Coming soon, you can have the system tell new offers when an item is taken. These are very powerful features when dealing with the large volume of responses you typically receive on free offers. The Krew was also worked very hard so that you can use e-mail OR the Kashless site to interact on listings. This is probably our coolest feature.
Requirement to be logged into Kashless.org. During the initial part of the Kashless Alpha, we let anyone who came to the site see all listings, make offers, and use most of the features without an account. But then we started thinking about transparency. Every Kashless.org member has a public profile page. Many of our third party sites that provide listings also only allow individual use of those listings. So we made the change to require users to be valid Kashless members in more cases. While this is a pain in many ways, it leads to more trustworthy transactions and a more efficient market.
Posted by Martin at 3:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack