I'm part of a relatively new startup (jut.io). We're building an analytics platform focused on ingesting operational data (logs, statsd metrics, collectd, alerts). Our secret sauce is a dataflow-driven analytics approach that works really well for both live and historical data. We believe our market is code-centric ops people and developers who also do ops.
Currently our strategy consists of:
(1) Hosting an online playground where anyone can use our dataflow language/visualizations without deploying anything (http://www.jut.io/play);
(2) Showing common use cases in action in that environment;
(3) Creating content showing examples of how you might use us.
My question:
What would convince you to sign up to beta a product like this?
For example, I'm the sole technical person for a number of projects. I leave my phone on at night, so that I can be alerted if things go terribly wrong.
That's both a pain and a fear. It's painful to be on-call all the time, and I'm afraid due to being the single point of failure, as well as the person responsible for cleaning up a mess.
(I'm lucky to live in a time when there are great tools available to make problems extremely rare, but you get my point.)
If someone pitched me: "Turn your phone off at night", that'd really hit home for me.
You need to find a similar way to illustrate how you're going to alleviate a pain point.