[lusr]

Thanks for this. Reading all this stuff about people releasing stuff after 2 nights of work I was starting to wonder if I was crazy having my closed beta planned after 3 months development. I've been working damn hard part-time on the core technology of my project. Time adds up slowly when you're working part-time, and surely sometimes a new idea really does require a fair bit of work before it's ready for customer feedback?

Then I saw your comment about iterating on real customer feedback and I realised there's no difference between "releasing early" and "release a beta [early and get feedback early]", and obviously the time to release a beta varies depending on the product. If you think about Google or Shazaam or any technology-based service, the core algorithms took time to develop to a point where a beta made sense because access to the technology was the product. Or am I missing something?)