Importance of a 'beta launch'

A beta launch is the launch of the product to a small sample of users from the target market. As trivial as it may sound, it is extremely important.

Once the initial product is ready, entrepreneurs tend to get impatient and want to go live and start marketing aggressively. One step which is very crucial before a big marketing campaign is a beta launch. In a beta, we expose the product to a small number of users from the target market. These users help us in analyzing how these users are using the product and what their feedback, We can assess whether these users are engaging with the product as we expected them to and what improvements/changes we need to make in the product before marketing on a bigger scale. If we market aggressively without doing a beta, we might end up spending good marketing money on a product which might not be the optimum one.

A beta helps fine tune the product and assess user engagement. Once we optimize these should be think of scaling up.