BricaBox Blog

It’s August 1, the day we told people we’d begin our alpha phase of development at BricaBox. As of now we have a few new users (mostly family) tooling around on the site and we’re getting great feedback already.

For the rest of you, it will be another week or so before we bring in the next dozen, and perhaps another few weeks before we let those folks begin inviting the next.

Why the slow alpha? As we’ve approached this date, the question we’ve been asking ourselves a lot is “What kind of alpha do we want this to be?” In software development there are two kinds of alphas: the slow one and the fast one. Here’s where we see the lines drawn:

Lost of people choose to do the fast alpha because the see the alpha as step in line with the direction they are heading. The alpha is a milestone before private beta, which is a milestone before launch. With the fast alpha, no major plans will change and early user influence over the ultimate product is negligible. The fast alpha is an act.

But we want this to be a slow alpha.

As you can imagine, we’re burning up to get the platform done and out into the hands of the masses. Fame, fortune, and everything that comes with it awaits us, right? Perhaps — but that’s not what we’re trying to do here, yet. First thing we need is a killer product, and the best way to get a killer product is to test your assumptions before investing too heavily in a ill-conceived design.

So far, we’ve heard nothing but great feedback and we want more of it. What’s great feedback? It’s not a pat on the back pushing you in the same direction, great feedback is game-changing advice which points you in a better direction. Especially when it comes to a product like BricaBox — a platform and an abstract one at that — great feedback tells about strengths you things you didn’t know your product had, and about weaknesses you didn’t think you had to worry about.

So, continue heading over to BricaBox.com and signing up for the alpha/beta email list. It’s from there where we’ll add the next users. And for now, thank you so much for being interested in the all we’re doing. We appreciate the interest and can’t wait to show you the goods.

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PS: If you’re interested in something else that’s interesting, check out this post from Bug Labs. They have a hardware product coming out that sounds a lot like how we talk about BricaBox.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 10:08 am and is filed under Alpha. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.