Launched a closed beta for my SaaS product and looking for users/feedback

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#1

Last week I launched a closed beta for my SaaS product, Keygen. So far the beta has been going smoothly (currently have ~50 active users out of a list of ~200 early access mailing list subscribers), but I’m looking for additional users to test and provide feedback on the product as I get things ready for the big launch.

Keygen is a dead-simple licensing API built for developers with a focus on small–medium sized products/apps (desktop and web). I created it to make licensing, something that has notoriously been intimidating and unintuitive, as easy to implement and manage as Stripe.

I’ve spent over 8 months on the project (I know, I know…) and am excited to finally have it in beta. I created Keygen out of frustration for the lack of good non-enterprisey licensing solutions available today. Having built multiple licensing APIs for small/medium apps in-house, all more or less the same, I set out to fix that issue.

I’d really appreciate any feedback on the product, the site and whatever else. And if you’re a product developer, I’d love additional beta users.

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#2

Had a quick look at the site.

First impression was that the (intentionally) glitchy header graphic put me slightly on edge, it didn’t give me that feeling of calm and confidence that a product like this should.

However, the site itself is otherwise very nice, I like the style, and the content is good, especially having the FAQ on the front page. The documentation seems pretty comprehensive (although I didn’t dig deep).

One thing I didn’t see answered front and centre was something that gave confidence that the service will be up and accessible as much as possible, which is pretty important, and one of the primary reasons for using this SaaS over something on my own web server.

Definitely an interesting service, if I had a product in the works at the moment I would definitely take it for a spin.

#3

Sorry, but I agree with @ianmjones. That header graphic is really jarring. It’s not a visual effect that I would associate with a reliable product and detracts attention away.

Under the Use your favorite languages heading it would be useful to have a toggle that allows switching between code samples in each of the supported languages. As a developer, I like to get a brief feel for an API in my native programming language.

Your product’s documentation is good. Perhaps link to the relevant sections from your homepage. As an example the Create policies heading could link to https://keygen.sh/docs/api/#policies-create I rate clear documentation as a good indicator of a well designed product.

Good luck with Keygen, I hope you’re successful.

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#4

@ianmjones and @slashdotdash, appreciate the feedback. That’s actually the first negative impressions I’ve received from the glitch/hacker effect, but your reasoning is valid. I think the effects have served me well getting beta users enticed (was on the front page of Hacker News late last year for a few days), but maybe it’d be a good idea to redesign those sections to be more professional.

I’m in the process of configuring uptime monitoring, so that will be mentioned in the FAQs once up. And I completely agree about the language bindings; that’s been planned, I just haven’t had the time to work on bindings other than the Node one recently, which is almost ready to release. I’m going to update that section as the bindings become available.

#5

hey @ezekg,

Check betalist, you could get some beta testers from there.

Bart.

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#6

Thanks for the recommendation—I had forgotten about beta list. I got an email last night that I was accepted into the waiting queue, so that’s cool! Apparently it takes about a month to get posted after getting accepted.

I went through and updated the FAQs to answer a few more questions and added a status/uptime page. I’m going to update the design to remove the flickering effects after it hits beta list and gets closer to launch.

I’d love to hear any additional thoughts.