Whoop, awesome to see Trak.io in there! Cheers Marc, good roundup.
For the record, we did launch private Beta but we've had to start limiting again as we pretty much had enough, and found we weren't managing support tickets as well with more and more joining.
When we launch paid plans in the new year, we'll be opening up out of Beta. But yeah, there's a very real and very functioning product behind that signup page :-)
Yeah it's good practice to take your private beta slow and invite early adopters in small batches. Seeing your service is all about understanding your users, how did you decide which users to give access to the private beta first? Or was it just chronologically?
At first chronological for the first few hundred, and then when server bills (and SaaS monitoring, backups etc.) stopped been insignificant, we switched to:
1) only honouring the promotions we had out there
2) the paid priority access people (Paying $19, then $29, to get access)
3) people from startups who could offer us a good PR boost by association on launch
We soft-launched ZenHub.io [1] on Betalist in early November and have been very happy with the results so far. Several hundred high quality users who are engaged, providing feedback [2], and inviting their team members. The tweet-storm whipped up by Betalist was cool too :)
Links at the very bottom of the page reveal a launch post[0] and their deck[1].
There's definitely an app, and it's definitely a social network—though perhaps if this or something like it catches on we'll require new terminology, as this model where every user gets categorized 'artist', 'curator', 'listener', 'tastemaker', 'consumer', etc. doesn't map very well to the one-size-fits-all peer networks we're used to.
As far as the sales channel is concerned, it's difficult to say. Somewhere between "we'll figure it out as we go" and "as long as we're taking down Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, Soundcloud, Tumblr, G+/YouTube, Vimeo and Myspace, we might as well also go after iTunes, Ticketmaster, Goldenvoice, Behance, content licensing, booking, event management…"
Ryan, there are no specific categories of users on August. There is one user account for everyone. However, if you are invited as an artist, you receive an additional distribution channel reserved for the quality content of true artists.
The view of August is that the world of media will change when an artist is able to sale 100 million copies of their work, all by themselves. This is the future, and we are building the platform that will make it happen.
"This is the future, and we are building the platform that will make it happen."
Yeah, keep telling yourself that. I know investors like to see confidence, but if you seriously believe your own hype, you'll be unprepared for failure. Chances are, you'll fail. Nothing to do with talent or how good your product is. Just luck. Learn humility. It will keep you from letting your guard down, and getting trampled on. And it will come in handy in case you fail.
A statement on one or the other of the linked pages (I don't recall if it was your blog post or the deck) referenced a sort of "leveling up" from voluntary curator-user to (for want of a better term) verified "tastemaker." That seemed, to me, to imply a certain granularity of user classes. You may want to clean up that language if that's not the case.
As for what it is, August is an iOS platform (with a very minimal web side to it) that builds sustainable relationships around media; relationships that unify and amplify the discovery, distribution, monetization, engagement, social experience, etc of digital media.
How? Simply, the platform we have built, and the thousands of artists who have created it.
For the record, we did launch private Beta but we've had to start limiting again as we pretty much had enough, and found we weren't managing support tickets as well with more and more joining.
When we launch paid plans in the new year, we'll be opening up out of Beta. But yeah, there's a very real and very functioning product behind that signup page :-)