A Beta Customer Is Not A Tester Or A User But An Early Customer

“Beta customer” blurs beta tester, beta user, and early customer. If you sell to business, beta customers  are early customers, not beta testers.

A Beta Customer Is Not A Tester Or A User But An Early Customer

This post is an explanation of  why we call the third of our five stages of startup growth the “early customer stage” and not “beta.”

Quid Pro Quo

• Beta Tester:  someone you pay to evaluate your software and provide written feedback and perhaps an oral debrief.
• Beta User: a friend, acquaintance, or friend of a friend doing you a favor using your product.  You can ask for an oral debrief or a written feedback but remember that they are doing you a favor.
• Early Customer:  someone who believes that your product will help to solve a problem or meet a need and who you believe has a reasonable prospect of deriving value from your product. If they are evaluating your software, they may not have paid for it yet, but there is a mutual expectation that they will pay if they achieve a satisfactory outcome in a given period of time that is mutually agreed to.

Testing Your Product

• Beta Testers are anxious to test your product to the extent you pay them.
• Beta Users are willing to test your product to return a favor or barter for a future favor.
• Early Customers are anxious to see if your product will produce a better result than the existing alternatives available to them. They are not anxious to “test” your product. If you are wise, you will ask them for representative data and attempt to verify that your software will meet their basic needs before you make it available to them.

Reporting Bugs

• Beta Testers like to report bugs because it’s proof of their value and that they deserve to be paid.
• Beta Users like to report bugs because they are concerned about their impact on your business reputation and potential customers’ experience.
• Early Customers normally don’t like to report bugs and tend to restrict themselves to ones that they want fixed.   As far as they are concerned the best outcome is that they can get the results they need with the software as is. If they are “documenting bugs’ they are having a service interaction that is unsatisfactory. More fundamentally, they are not pointing out “technology problems’ as much as business, relationship, and reputation problems.

SKMurphy Take: Ultimately it’s not about Beta but Better

None of this is to imply that you cannot launch experimental offerings for current customers or new categories of prospects. These exploratory approaches are part of managing your business in the same way that altering any other aspect of your engagement or service delivery process would need to be managed. Giving current customers access to new versions of your software is often also called beta site or beta customer. In this case, the access to new functionality and your request for feedback is part of an existing relationship, and I have less trouble with this use of the term.

Ultimately, it’s not about beta but better. If you are selling to a business, you cannot adopt the same attitude that Google or Twitter has in providing a free service to an audience that they plan to monetize:  you want your product to be a better alternative than anything else they can afford at any point in time that they are using it. Your product does not have to be perfect, just better for the metrics and results that your customers value.

“Your brand is the promises that you keep.”
Kristin Zhivago

Related Blog Posts

• Experiments vs. Commitments
• Getting Better at Customer Discovery Conversations
• A Recent Experience As A Beta User
• User Experience Research vs. Customer Discovery
• Q: Should I Pre-Sell My Product?
• Appreciative Inquiry Mind Set Essential to Customer Discovery
• Don’t Explore Thoughtland In Interviews

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