Going alpha, and birthday suits

Posted by Amit on 11 Dec, 2007

We finally launched yewoh into alpha testing this past week. Not everything is working quite the way we would like it, and we’re very much less-than-satisfied with our current infrastructure. If we had unlimited money, or even a little bit of it (hint, hint), we would have paid for all kinds of hosting luxuries. However, other than our main site (hosted at the excellent rimuhosting), we’re essentially self-hosted. Which means things sometimes stop running in the middle of the night, and we have to get them going again. We’re in the process of automating as much as we can, but in the mean time, it’s many sleepless nights.

Which, by itself, wouldn’t be so bad. No, the real issue is that now that we’re in alpha, I certainly feel like we’re wearing our birthday suits. Yes, it feels like we’re naked. So far, we had been showing our application to only friends and family. Who’re mostly geeks. Sorry, dad. Given that we also have day jobs, we also couldn’t help congratulating ourselves on every little bit of progress we made, however trivial.  If we didn’t feel like working on a particular day, we’d just not, because after a long days work at office, you don’t always have the energy to stay up till 3 in the morning. So, we had good excuses.

Not any more! Our users won’t care if we genetically mutated into creatures that didn’t need sleep anymore so that we could work round the clock. No, our users would expect for things to just work. I also highly doubt if they’d be as tolerant as our friends are of my rather poor web-design skills. So… basically, everything is up for criticism. No excuses!

Hence the feeling of being… naked.

Thankfully, our early alpha users have had only nice things to say. Of course, each conversation left us with a list of things to fix and improve, but on the whole, the feedback has been rather positive. Despite the fact that each such interaction meant even more work for us, it’s very satisfying to be getting this input from actual users, from out there in the wild. What a thrill it is to have someone use your site, and drop you a line to say they liked it! This is what keeps us going now… in the beginning was the doubt and anxiety that comes from not knowing how our hard-work would be perceived by our potential users. We wanted to do as much as we could to ensure they’d like what they saw. Now that we actually have a few users, we’re trying very hard to delight them. I know I speak for everyone on the yewoh team when I say that it’s really an awesome feeling to deploy a new build to our production servers, with a bunch of things fixed and new requests coded up – all of which came from someone who likes the site. Truly, what else could be more exhilarating?

We do plan to up the game a little bit this coming weekend… we’re looking to take the current friends-and-family alpha to a friends-of-friends beta. Hopefully, we will be able to gather more ideas and feedback which we can then start to work on. If you’re interested in trying out the yewoh service, register with us, and we’d be happy to get you set up with the beta. Drop us a line here.

That’s all for now, folks… I do believe it’s time again for some caffeine. Hope to see you around!