Prefinery

You can now send your beta invitation emails as HTML!

When you create your HTML email, be sure to also create a plain-text version.  Some ancient email clients cannot read HTML emails, but you can help these technology laggards by creating a plain-text version.

Of course, you can opt to only send plain-text emails if HTML isn’t your thing.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback!

Are you ready to make your beta go viral?

Prefinery’s new Invite-a-Friend widget lets your testers invite their friends to your beta!

Here’s how it works:

You decide how many friends each tester is allowed to invite, then just sit back and let news of your awesome site spread by word of mouth!

You have complete control over the body of the Invite-a-Friend email invitation and your testers are even able to add their own personal note.  It takes less than 5 minutes to install the Invite-a-Friend widget on your site, so give it a try today!

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback!

Every Tuesday morning I pull a list of all users who have created a new account between 7 and 14 days ago and send them a welcome email.  The goal is to collect their first impression feedback.

When possible, I personalize the email.  If I know their name, I include it.  If I know their company or product name, I’ll check it out and include a comment.  I don’t use a mass email service — the welcome email is hand-crafted and sent from my own account.

Over the last month I have experimented with two different email templates …

Draft A - Short and Sweet

SUBJECT:  How are you liking Prefinery?

Hi there,

Can I answer any questions about your new Prefinery account?  How can I help make your beta more successful?

Just drop me an email if there’s anything I can do to help you launch your product!  I’d also love to hear your feedback on Prefinery, which you can give by completing a very brief, 8 question survey:

http://survey.io/survey/4e4ea

Cheers,
Justin

Justin Britten
Founder, Prefinery
http://www.prefinery.com

Draft B - Relate & Appeal to the Human Desire to Help

SUBJECT:  Please Help by Giving Feedback on Prefinery

Hello,

Thank you for signing up for an account on Prefinery!
What do you think so far?  Can I answer any questions?

I know that you’re incredibly busy, but it would be a
huge help to me if you could take a quick minute to pass
along your feedback. I’m bootstrapping this start-up and
working hard to make Prefinery the best software for
launching a private beta.

Please respond to this email directly, or feel free to give
feedback anonymously by taking this very brief, 8 question
survey:

http://survey.io/survey/4e4ea

I look forward to hearing from you!

Cheers,
Justin

Justin Britten
Founder, Prefinery
http://www.prefinery.com

Follow @prefinery on Twitter - http://twitter.com/prefinery

I’ve been doing this for just over one month, and have a response rate of 10%.  Both direct email replies and survey completions end up about equal, at approximately 10% each.

My sample size isn’t big enough for me to draw any conclusions from the A/B test just yet — I’ll update this post once the winner is known.  Winner aside, I’m quite pleased with the feedback I’m getting from my new users!

Let’s start with a pretty picture which illustrates how the new Tester Check-in feature will magically clean up your tester stats …

When a tester checks-in their status will be set to active. Your active testers are those who have accepted your invitation and are actively using your product.

In addition to checking-in a tester, you can also configure Prefinery to automatically move a tester into an idle status if they haven’t checked-in recently.  Tester Idling can be configured from the Advanced Settings page.

We recommend checking-in a tester each time they log into your site and enabling tester idling.

This automatic grouping of your testers can be very powerful.  For example, you may want to send a welcome / thank-you email to your active testers.  Or, perhaps, a please-come-back email to your idle testers.

As always, we welcome your feedback!

We’re now including everything about a tester when you export to a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file!

You’ll now find each testers’ status, invitation code, applied date, invited date, and their answers to all of the questions you asked on your invitation form included in the exported file.

This file can easily be opened in Excel and most other spreadsheet applications. It is also an extremely common format used by many Web sites when importing data.

You now have control over what information is shown in the list of all testers!

Just click the Customize icon, found at the bottom right of the table, to get started.  You can include any information collected from your invitation form.

By customizing your testers table, you can easily scan many applications at once and quickly invite testers in bulk.  We hope you enjoy this new feature!  As always, we welcome your feedback.

We’ve heard your feedback and responded to your suggestions.  Now, we’re finally ready for prime-time.  Prefinery has officially launched!

Thank you all for your fabulous endorsements!

We even got some great articles written in VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch.

Free Prefinery Bronze Account for OUR Beta Testers

As our way of saying thank you for being a beta tester, we’re giving you a free Bronze-level account! You don’t have to do a thing - next time you log into Prefinery you’ll have access to all the features included in our Bronze plan.

Additionally, if you upgrade to a Silver-level plan or higher by September 15, 2009 we’ll give you two months for free! At the conclusion of your first paid month we’ll automatically extend your service for two months at no extra charge.

Join Our Tester Community

Check-out Beaker5, our community of early adopters and get exclusive access to the hottest Web betas!

Tell us your interests by signing up and we’ll give you priority access to matching sites as they launch.  Your feedback will help build better products.