Collaborative development – the power of beta testing

April 26, 2009 at 3:13 pm | Posted in Sofware Startup | Leave a comment
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Don’t underestimate the power of beta testing to a wide range of people. Consider it collaborative development. Open your software to a broad range of people inside and outside of your target market and you’ll be amazed at what you get back from them.

A perfect example is my current project MioWorks.com. We opened up for public beta testing a couple weeks ago. In that time we have been getting amazing feedback that has allowed us to direct our development resources to the must have features of a target set of users.

Now you can’t just run off and implement every feature that is throw at you by the beta group. But you can listen to them as a whole and look for trends and commonalities. For us, we knew that we needed to implement ways to improve data manipulation and the feedback gave us the exact path to take. As we complete the development and roll it out, we are extremely confident that this effort will be well received by our beta group.

So open yourself up to critique and criticism early in the process.  You may also want to adopt some not-so-traditional approaches by using social media.  We encourage our beta group to use Twitter to spout off feature needs and questions in real time – all they have to do is respond @Mioworks and we collect that data and use it in our analysis and product planning.

In the end, no matter how you do it, building software should be a collaborative process that takes into account your target market.

MioWorks opens to private preview

February 20, 2009 at 4:06 pm | Posted in Sofware Startup | Leave a comment
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The MioWorks.com application is now alive and kicking.  MioWorks is a hosted application that allows you to manage your contact information, perform simple CRM activities like saving notes and scheduling followups as well as a bi-directional interaction with your contacts.  MioWorks makes it simple to share files with contacts or allow contacts to upload files for you.  It even allows contacts to ask questions and make requests.

We opened up to a private preview yesterday and invited the attendees of Ignite Portland 5 to be our first participants.   If you have an invitation card you will find a code on the back that will allow you into the application.  If you don’t have a card, you can use the code miopreview to gain access to the application.

This preview period is all about your opinion.  So take a few moments and tour the application.  You’ll receive an email after you signup that will give you a chance to provide us direct feedback.

Thanks for the help and we look forward to launching MioWorks.com as a production solution very soon.

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