#1: You’re going to need a catchier less awkward title in order to start a revolution.

#2: I heart the beta culture.

Even though I hate when things don’t work and hate over-paying for products when they first come out, why am I so pro beta culture, well, because:

A) Instrument Flight Rules.

As a startup junkie, I’m consumed with product creation. And, the products from scratch business is one full of scary assumptions. The scariest: your product is assumed to have value. If you end up building something people don’t want you just created yourself a warehouse full of past-due inventory.

Obviously, the goal is create something (a lot of) people want. But, how do you do this? How do you know you’re not wasting your time and dollars on making something that just isn’t needed? The answer: data. You need data. Product data, customer data, etc. Data, data, data.

As product creators we need feedback - implicit and explicit. And, it is much better to get this data in the wild. (The hard part for creators is the judgment on what the minimum marketable set for your product is before releasing it - perhaps a future blog post?).

Pilots have both Instrument and Visual Flight Rules. Instrument flight rules (IFR) are for when navigation is maintained by aircraft instruments only. Essentially, the Pilot can fly even though he can’t see anything outside the cockpit windows. How long would our pilot last if those instruments failed or if they took a calendar quarter to update? Yep. Not long at all. Same is true for founders of startups. In the beginning we’re all flying by IFR. The faster our instrument panels update the more likely we’re going survive.

B) Reid Hoffman and Eric Ries say so.

Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn; investor in facebook, flickr, etc) famously said “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late”.

It is hard for product creators to release software they’re embarrassed by. But we need to, we need to see if anyone cares and hopefully *why* they care.

N.B. For any founders out there looking to constantly steer their products to success, I recommend reading Eric Ries’ blog (get started here). Eric is responsible for my biggest aha moment of 2008.

C) The declining cost of communications and technology.

Hardware, software, and communicating keeps getting cheaper. The trend towards a “beta culture” will strengthen not weaken. I suspect this is only the beginning.

Michael

p.s. AD: Interested in getting on our beta list for http://beta.gwabs.com - send me an email.

Thanks for selecting us as the #4 best Web2.0 company and inviting us to speak at the PICK20 awards reception. Much appreciated!

Thanks,

Michael

p.s. For those not in attendance: the PICK20 awards we’re held in a room modeled after the UN.

p.p.s. Thanks to Jonathan Kallner from KPMG for the warm welcome and to Peter Wolchak from Backbone for moderating the panel consisting of Leonard from NowPublic, Kate from LintBucket, Bernie from ConceptShare and yours truly.

Yours,

Michael