

How do you manage your closed beta invites? - nicoperez

How do you manage your closed beta invites?<p>Do you create an individual invite code for everyone who signs up to try your beta? Or have some codes which can be used multiple times (eg works for 10 signups)?<p>Are there any sites that manage the whole process of people applying for invites, sending out invites, etc? Inviteshare.com is the nearest thing I could find, but it's geared more towards exchanging invites between users.
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ALee
So the HackerNews invite code for JamLegend is located in our DB. Our strategy
has been the following:

A) Create one invite code, send that to a lot of people. B) From the people
who sign up, give each new account an invite code itself, so that person can
sign up. You can assign a random string or set a class for 2nd degree invites.
C) Repeat step B, and adjust invites accordingly to the amount of growth.

A prerequisite for Step B is making sure that you have invitations built into
the system, so that people it won't be ignored.

~~~
nicoperez
Good suggestions. I also saw on your website that you ask people to twitter
@jamlegend or become a fan on facebook, that's a great hack for spreading the
word/hype!

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aliasaria
We add custom invite code to each application. For each app, we have an admin
site that has a button that allows us to generate a single invite -- a button
that says "gimme a ticket". It uses an sqlite table to store all of them.
Every time an account is created, it checks if the invite code exists and has
been used yet. If it hasn't been used, the form validates and the username of
the new user is stored in the ticket table so we can track which invites are
used.

Some good features to have for a ticketing system: \- ability to type in an
email or set of emails and it automatically sends a different beta code to
each address \- ability to have one invite be able to create more than one
account (sometimes we send a code to a company and tell them to create a few
accounts for their staff, each invite can create X users before it expires) \-
have a date expiry on invites so you can toss-out old ones

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vaksel
If its already in beta then why do you want to limit the # of people who are
actually excited to try out your application? If its not ready for prime time
then call it an alpha.

To me Beta is pretty much something that's ready to go prime time, everything
works, you spent a few days testing it to make sure you don't crash the
system, but you still want to spend some time with a much larger audience
testing it to sort out all the missed bugs. Alpha to me is when you just
finished coding it up and only did the most basic stuff to check if everything
works.

If its an alpha then use the one at a time invite, if its beta set max # of
users and use one at a time method if you need to give out some extra invites
to more valuable testers

~~~
Zev
One problem with what you're saying is how you define "beta". Everyone defines
it differently (What Google considers beta is different than what I would
consider beta which is different than what you consider beta.

A larger problem (you're not alone in making this mistake) is trying to lump
software development into set, solid stages. Development is more fluid then
"OK. we're beta. next up is final release and we're done forever." It's
doubtful that you ever stop adding features or making something better. And if
that _is_ the case, I'm not entirely sure I'd want to use your product knowing
it'll never be improved beyond 1.0.

As for why you might want to limit invites? Maybe you're trying to figure out
how much it can scale with what you currently have before you work on it some
more? Or maybe you want to try the limited scarcity thing out. Who knows the
motivations.

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cperciva
_How do you manage your closed beta invites?_

I'm a luddite: I ask people to send me an email if they want to beta test, and
then when I'm ready for more beta testers I go through my inbox, create
accounts, and send out emails.

~~~
nicoperez
That works for 10 to 20 invites, but it wouldn't be fun to scale it to 100's
;)

~~~
cperciva
Quite true -- I have an advantage here that for tarsnap I don't want to have
hundreds of beta testers yet, since I'm paying for all the storage people use.
:-)

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DougBTX
> Inviteshare.com is the nearest thing I could find

You might find something if you google for "coupon manager" or something like
that.

