Ask HN: Should you say your product is in beta in the website or not?

In our website we clearly state that we are in beta testing phase and that we're looking for beta testers.

I was convinced that being clear on this was good. But three times already other people have told me to, at the very least, hide it a bit as it will scare away potential users.

So, I'm confused. Should I just stick to a "try it for free" msg (as in fact, as of today, you cannot yet buy the product) instead of saying we're beta testing?

6 comments

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greenyoda 4y ago ↗

I think that being up-front about the product being in beta is better.

If I "try it for free" and see a product that's not good enough for release, I'll give up and never come back again. If I know your product is in beta, I could see myself signing up to get notified when the product is officially released.

dkersten 4y ago ↗

This is my feeling too. Yes, beta might scare away users, but they may come back later. If someone signs up only to find it in "beta quality" and leave because its not up to their standards, those people aren't coming back and may even say negative things to others.

softmodeling 4y ago ↗

I think this could also depend on your target users. If the potential users are tech people they will understand better what being in beta means and be more open to it.

I'm not sure this is also the case when we're talking about business/non-tech users

dkersten 4y ago ↗

That's a good point, yes.

t3e 4y ago ↗

We're deliberating this ourselves. Our investors strongly advocate removing the "beta" because our product is solid and complete (in fact pretty polished at this point) and we're doing ourselves no favors. I think they're right. To me the question is simply: what's more accurate? We were honestly in beta 8 months ago; at some point we just had customers happily using a product we're progressively making better.

armchairhacker 4y ago ↗

I wouldn’t say “beta” unless your software is really buggy and subject to change. Then I would make that really clear (“our software is incomplete and unstable”) and accept that I’m going to have less users.

You could also say version 0.x, which isn’t very noticeable.

“Beta” has kind of lost its meaning, since plenty of really buggy software has been released for a long time, and plenty of amazing software is still in beta or 0.x because the developers want it to be absolutely perfect.