It looks like syndeo::media’s first in-house product is finally coalescing into something usable. This is particularly exciting for me because it was right around mid-November last year when I first sat down and wrote out the original brief for the idea. Over a full year in gestation, wow. I can honestly say that I’ve never worked on anything pre-launch this long in my entire life.
That said, I’ll be the first to admit that the product as it stands right now still needs a lot of polish before it’ll be ready for primetime, so I’ve been putting quite a bit of thought into exactly how to launch this thing without our collective inboxes being inundated with 500 errors. It’s a tricky situation, because testing in the wild is the only way to really get a good feel for what else we need to improve. Too many testers, and we’ll be overwhelmed with bug reports. Too few, and we won’t get enough.
(Notice that I’ve completely glossed over precisely what this app is, or what it’s for. At the moment, all I can say is that it’s a social-network, and that at its core, it takes its cues from the looking-glass theory, as originally posited by the sociologist C.H. Cooley over a century ago. Yeah, I’m pretty old-school that way.)
The solution I’ve decided to run with, at this point in time, is to very slowly introduce the product to more and more users over the next two months. This week, we’ll start doing private-testing within syndeo, and maybe include some (very) close friends. Total population of not more than 25 early testers. The goal here would be to make sure the most embarassing bugs are squashed before we actually push to a larger audience.
If all goes well, we’ll start inviting alpha-testers from the local online community soon after. (The official milestone sits in the middle of the last week of November, but I’ve got my fingers crossed that we can get that process going sooner.) Because the year is almost ending, we’ll almost certainly have to keep the alpha-test version going well into January/February of 2008 and probably only move to beta in the second quarter.
Of course, all of that’s just a rough timeline. syndeo is growing in fits and starts as this is going on, and it’s difficult to predict where we’ll be two months from now, let alone five. We’ll get this thing out the door no matter what though; you can be sure of that.