Navigating the Debut: Lessons from Our Beta Launch

Since we've started public beta of The Write Kit, we've learned a lot about users' passions, product ease-of-use, the author tool market at large—just to name a few.

We haven't yet pushed hard on public marketing and promotion. This is due to a bunch of things that we're still in the middle of digesting.

Debuts are tricky things, especially in these days of MVP releases and rapid CI/CD pipelines. On the one hand you want to tell everyone about your pride and joy, but on the other you can't shake the feeling that busy and distracted people can only give you a limited window of appreciation once you call on them.

Conveying product market fit in just a minute or two of people's time is surprisingly hard. The product team wants to show off utility, while the marketing team wants to hook 'em with charm and emotional appeal. Finding the balance between the two is tough.

The excellent news at the moment is that the engineering team has created a kick-ass CI/CD workflow that allows us to spin up significant new features in just a week or two. That was always the goal: set up the fundamentals in such a way that adding value (whether new features or simplifying UI) takes little marginal effort.

We'll be talking about new features and capabilities in the next few days as we finally weigh anchors and get the Write Kit out to open seas.