A new beta product is always exciting! It’s like launching a mission to space. A lot of intense labour goes into researching what’s the right thing to build considering the market opportunity and unmet customer needs. Once it’s ready, you put it out and hope it crosses the earth’s atmosphere and gets into the right orbit, which in product world translates to customers loving your product and starting to engage with it. After the first big milestone of finding a good market opportunity to address, there are few more key factors to consider to make your beta successful. Here are a few considerations to ensure the beta finishes the cross lines.
Find the right target customers
Whether its a brand new startup idea, or it’s a beta product you are experimenting with your current user base, either way it is critical to understand the right target user group for the beta. The science behind finding the right customer might slightly vary depending on whether it’s a B2B or B2C product user base and what opportunity you are trying to address. If you have done some initial concept validations and have spoken to a few potential users as part of your research, you should have enough insights to understand who would benefit the most from the opportunity you have in hand. If you are following a PLG(product led growth) style, then you should have some power users or advocates you can rely on to give you great feedback. Always start with a small test group, like 20–30 customers or a small 3–5% of your user base to validate your beta instead of going big bang. This helps you keep the feedback loop small and meaningful, and also helps discover other problems that needs addressing before you can scale.
Make it discoverable and accessible
Once you know your target user group, the next key step is to ensure the users are able to discover and access this new beta. This gets a bit tricky with B2B product as you will be dealing mostly with confidential data and its critical to ensure the right consent, disclosures are in place if your beta needs more data to function. This can be covered as part of a beta kick off plan where you should clearly communicate to the users how the product works, what data is being accessed and request their consent if needed, what’s the subscription model whether its free trial or freemium with limited usage, etc. Once the base is set, ensure to position the feature or find good navigation patterns that easily fits into your target user’s workflow, where the users can easily find it to explore. Don’t forget to leave enough cues, or product guidance tips to enable the users to understand the feature and explore it.
Layout feedback avenues
Have a good plan of how you are going to gather feedback about the beta. Analytics is definitely a good indicator, but with a small target user base its not the only metric that should be taken for success criteria. It’s important we have avenues to really hear the voice of the customer, what did they think and feel about the product. There are multiple ways to get this input, either it could be weekly calls with customers or in-app surveys to gather qualitative feedback from the users. This would also be of great value as most users also give you a lot of ideas that would help evolve the product for success.
Evaluate the feedback
Once you have gathered the feedback, evaluate to understand if your base product is seeing enough success signals or there is potential but there are things that needs to be addressed with utmost priority to really make it a success or its simply not good enough and your team might be better off researching new opportunities. This might also be a good stage to re-evaluate your competition space and see if your investment will reap the timely benefits that could propel your business revenue. At the end, beta is all about learning what works or doesn’t work.
