What our 2 obvious mistakes on beta testing and user feedback taught us

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Statistically speaking, startups have a 25 percent chance of failing in their first year. While this number increases over time, with 71 percent of startups failing after 10 years, the first year is important.

Challenges mount and mistakes are made in the early years of a startup. But the key is how you respond to those mistakes.

Take it from one startup that went through them and lived to tell the tale.

Our story

Our startup, Yocale, is a Canada-based SaaS startup which we started in 2013. We offer online booking and scheduling software to service-based businesses.

Our company came into being after a skiing accident (of all events). After the accident, I had to go back and forth between different practitioners, and it was a headache. I knew there had to be a better way.

With Yocale, we wanted to make it easier for local businesses to make appointments online without having to make time-consuming phone calls, emails, and so on. This also meant that people didn’t have to go through the headache I did after my skiing accident.

That’s our company in a nutshell.

Our mistakes

A lot of the mistakes we made early on had to do with testing and feedback.

1. Choosing the wrong beta testers

In the beginning, we thought we had it all figured out. We did market research and ran the idea and prototype with our target audience. We asked our friends to participate in our alpha and beta rollouts.

That was a mistake.

Some users never came through, and those that did told us how intuitive our user experience was. But this feedback came from friends and not an audience who would actually use the product. Because of that, we didn’t place importance on certain features that should have been a priority in reality. So, we had to go back to the drawing board a few times.

There was also another problem when we did beta testing while some features were still lacking. This prevented our testers from testing our software like a complete piece. Again, this caused us to go back to the drawing board a few times.

Lessons learned