After 8 months of coding, two months of testing, and a week of nail biting anticipation, your little startup is finally ready to hit beta. You are excited, nervous, and perhaps, looking forward to hearing joyous praise about your kick-ass service.
But there’s a problem: no one knows about your startup yet. And since you are in beta, you desperately need beta testers to fill out the ranks and provide valuable feedback for future iterations.
This is where LaunchSide steps in.
This Oregon City based startup which just raised $25k in seed funding from the Portland Seed Fund, essentially works as a startup discovery platform. Sign up for the site and you will get early access to other beta-stage startups with some perks (reduced prices, extra storage space, etc.) included. And of course, you get geek snob points for being one of the early adopters for what might very well turn into a major service in the future.
It’s a win-win situation for developers as well as users. Users get to try out new, unheard of apps and websites, along with early adopter perks, while startups get to generate some buzz ahead of the full launch, along with some valuable feedback.
Considering that there are hundreds of new startups being launched every day, LaunchSide will have to be very picky about which startups it lets into the pen. A few poor services, and customers might very well lose faith in the idea (and it is a good idea).
Simultaneously, it will also have to build up a strong user base of its own. The startup discovery space isn’t short of competition. Dozens of blogs (this included) obsessively follow tech startups to uncover interesting new apps and services. LaunchSide will have its hands full if it wants a piece of this lucrative pie.
First impressions: I found the site design a little confusing. Sign up is cumbersome since LaunchSide insists on emailing me a password, which I then have to change. That just adds an extra unnecessary step to the entire process.
After signing in, I wasn’t quite sure what to do. The expected links – account, settings, etc. – were MIA, and it took a while to figure out that the large image underneath the “Get Early Access” was actually another startup (MyEStoreApp.com). Another “Get Free Access” banner clouding the right-hand side corner could also be construed as misleading advertising as MyEStoreApp.com itself offers a free-to-try plan.
I was also expecting an intelligent sorting algorithm that will let me move a few sliders around to see the startups I want to see (say, mobile, crowdsourcing, gaming, etc.).
At the conceptual level, this is an idea with some meat to it. But to attract uses, it will have to iron out the chinks in the design and convince startups to offer more enticing perks to early adopters.
