Prefinery

We use Prefinery at Prefinery, of course.

When you visit our signup page and request an invitation code, a Prefinery-powered form collects your name, email address, whether you are in the Web or Desktop software business, when you plan on launching your beta, and how you heard about us.

A daily e-mail digest of new testers, as well as an RSS feed, lets us know when we’ve got new signups.

When we got TechCrunched we gave out a special invitation code (TECHCRUNCH) good for 100 uses.  When TechCrunch readers went to our site to sign up, we validated the invitation code using the Prefinery API.

Using our own analytics we monitor graphs showing the rate at which new testers sign up.  We know our conversion rate (views of our signup form to actual signups) is 37%!  Our analytics also tell us that 75% of our testers are creating Web software and only 25% are working on Desktop applications.

Sending an e-mail survey to all beta testers was incredibly easy.  From within Prefinery we exported all testers to Campaign Monitor in a matter of seconds.

We are our biggest customer.  You should be yours.

Here are just some of the ways that being our biggest customer and eating our own dog food helped us make a better product:

1. We became experts in our domain.

We refined our own beta management process along the way - everything from collecting feedback to communicating with our customers.  We’re baking these lessons right into our product to help our customers run a more successful beta program.

By being your biggest customer you have no choice but to become an expert in your field.

2. We quickly discovered what must-have features were missing.

Once we started managing our own beta of a couple hundred testers we quickly became frustrated with our own product.

3.  We kept ourselves in line.

Not only did we discover new features, but in some cases we invalidated existing features.  We found ourselves asking, “Why did we build that?“  or “Do we really need this?“  Best of all, we never had to wonder “What do our customers want?”

4. We performed real end-to-end testing, continuously.

It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture.  You’re so busy testing individual features that you miss stepping through the product, just as your customer would.  By living in our app we caught bugs way before our customers.  Furthermore, we often found that the flow, or experience, of a given task just didn’t feel right once all the pieces were put together.  Best of all, we got this end-to-end testing for free.