Soft openings aren't just for restaurants

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes from the thirty seven signals team with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier, Hansen, cofounders of thirty seven signals. We are launching a new product very soon, Fizzy. We've been talking about it for a while. And this is the first time, at least since I've been here, that we have used outside people outside the company to help us as beta testers. So I thought we would talk a little bit about that and the process that we're using with that. So I'll, Jason, let you jump in. I would imagine there's some point where too many beta testers is probably a problem and not enough is not helpful. So kind of talk me through how many people we're bringing in to test this product. We set up a list. So we have couple thousand people on the list so far, and they will all get an invite before we make the public launch announcement. But initially, we're gonna be inviting five, ten, fifteen, twenty five kinda handpicked people who we know. And this is basically just to, like, make sure there's no major blind spots where we didn't totally miss something. Not, like, in the product itself necessarily. Like, not like a feature we're missing or something, but, like, something, like, flat out broken that we just were so close to it, we just can't see it. And sometimes it's, like, around login even and sign up and onboarding and all the stuff you have to deal with, but you're not close enough to it to see it really. That's kinda why we have, a small handful of people ahead of the public launch. That said, again, we will invite all these other people before the public launch just for, like, thank you for signing up on the mailing list and being interested. It's not like we're saying there's no bugs in the product and we're looking for bugs to help us find them. Like, we're fixing stuff all day long. There's a long list of things that aren't gonna get fixed for v one. But it's just good to have people walking through and running through and playing with it and seeing it. And it's good for us to know other people are doing this because you have to start thinking about things like data loss. It starts to matter. When you have customers, this is like their beta account is going to be their actual account. So they're gonna sign up, and that's their account. So now we gotta be really careful. And, you know, we're already careful, but now we have to be extra careful and think about uptime and all the other things that really matter when it comes to being stewards of people's information and their accounts. And so this is a big reason why I think we we get beta testers …