We have an announcement to make… What? No, stop that. It’s not a baby. We are ‘releasing’ the private beta of our website, MeltingFood.
Taking advice from Pierre Francois, the elevator pitch for our website is, “it’s like Facebook, but for food” (just the trusted network part of Facebook – not everything like, ahem, stalking, that comes with social networking sites). But no, this post is not an invitation to join the site – it’s almost the opposite.
Although we do have dreams of extending our 2-person alpha user-base, we’ve made a decision to limit the number of new users to a couple per week starting with whomever happens to be visiting. But if people want to join your site, why restrict them?
Exclusivity
As we start out, we’re making a choice between being completely open to the public or expanding via our existing friendships. And we’re going for exclusivity – no one can join unless they’re invited by a current member: not only is it easier to build software targeted at ‘us’, we also want this as a point of difference – once you’re invited, your excellent recipes won’t be disparaged by random comments about how horrible it is that you eat baby cows or that everything tastes better with horseradish. Sure, this won’t create a top 10 ‘pop’ list of what’s hot in recipes, but a referral-only system means a higher level of trust and in turn, a higher quality of recipes (to your individual taste), on the site.
Personalisation
With 2 main users and 1 main developer, the feedback loop is small. Emails from alpha testers immediately create cases in Fogbugz, leading to a high level of interaction and fast feedback. For the initial group, we can pick up the phone and chat to get helpful feedback – as opposed to responses like “here’s what I think of you and your stupid site !*£$! £*%!$ £*%*” (translated as ‘you might want to get comfortable, this goes on for a long while’).
Pain minimisation
The best way to test software is to get new users to use it. Each new set of eyes highlights usability issues, identifies the most obvious bugs and generates new ideas. By adding a few users at a time, things can be corrected more quickly, so those early obvious bugs affect far fewer people than if we opened it up to all.
Can we handle it?
No. Well maybe we can scale from two to fifty without imploding, but it’s going to hurt a lot less to annoy some of our fantastic early adopters, than to turn away a flood of interest (shh, I know there isn’t a flood, but it’s poor manners to tell the emperor he’s naked).
PS: If anyone is super-keen to take a look, let us know and we’ll add you to the beta list.
Tags: exclusivity, MeltingFood, releases
Hey Mel!
Congrats and well done! Can I join? I would love to take a look!
Sure, I’ve sent you an invitation. Gotta put some Singaporean recipes on though!