Release Philosophy

With our private beta coming online, it’s time to give a quick heads-up on our philosophy about releasing. About a week ago I came across this post which does a great job of summarizing two choices for going to market: Big Bang vs. Darwinian Evolution.

There’s no need to repeat it all, but suffice it to say, we’re not doing the late ’90’s dot com approach of trying to build version 5.0 and launch with a colossal party (fun as that might be). We’re committed to the other path: release early and often. The value of getting our product in the hands of users, and then listening and acting on that feedback, can’t be overstated. This approach was one of our keys to success at Serials Solutions. Our release cycles were shorter than our competitors, we were more serious about listening to our users, and we responded faster. As a result, we were able to win in product lines where competitors had multi-year head-starts on us. We’re taking it up a notch here, with a serious commitment to agile development.

We’ll be reaching out to more people over the upcoming weeks, inviting them to check out the service and provide feedback. Yes, you will find some big bugs, missing functionality, and strange use cases. The servers will probably bonk out as well. But we’ve got a great team in place, we’re squashing the bugs, and growing the application fast.

Best of all, the earliest users will be able to say “I saw it when…”