Being a beta-tester

A beta-tester is a person in a target market who is sometimes compensated (monetarily, or in kind) to offer feedback and sometimes testimonials of a product, a product's feature, or service.

Innovation Life Cycle

It goes by many names: Technology adoption model/ curve/ life cycle/...

When an idea or concept is introduced to a group of people/ the public, it gets accepted/ used at different pace by different societies/ markets. There are 5 segments of such:

• Innovators
• Early Adopters
• Early Majority
• Late Majority
• Laggards

Wins and Losses

I have been an innovator, very few times. I think, maybe I have not gotten my niche yet, 😅. I have however been in the early adopters and early majority camps and experienced wins and losses. Here are some:

• Some products fail to achieve profitability hence die out 👎

• Some products are 'killed' (decommissioned) by their creators 😠

  Sometimes you're one of the few (sometimes many) who liked it

  Examples:

  • Google+ launched then shutdown by Google on April 2019

  • Inbox by Google shut down by Google on April 2, 2019

    Google is notorious for such. Killedbygoogle.com is a site listing products that have been 'killed' by Google.

• Some products start as freemium then have a subscription/ paid product 🙄 (Of course, they need to make money)

  Examples:

  • Ratio by Blloc (An Android launcher) - The subscription was too high for the value proposition for me.

• Some start out as a paid product then become freemium 🤷

  This can be considered a win since at one point you gave the team behind it some runway

• Some products are really good that what they supported becomes a feature in a supporting or competing product 🧐

  Examples:

  • [Quicklyrics] shows lyrics for audio and video that's playing on your phone. Shazam; Apple Music and Spotify now have this as a feature somewhat.

• Some get bought by other stakeholders (Which might affect your user experience - positively/ negatively)

  Examples:

  • Microsoft launcher was formerly Arrow Launcher

• Early adopters sometimes are enrolled in a beta-testing program; hence they contribute to the future of the product (sometimes this comes with perks) 🎉

Current products I'm a beta tester of

• GitHub (as a GitHub Star)
• CircleCI (as a CircleCI Champion)
• YouVersion
  Read my post on YouVersion as a tech tool for KingdomBIZ