How this goes public, in four phases

Last month I wrote that building had stopped being the hard part, and that my hours should go to conversations instead of commits. That’s easy to say and vague enough to never actually do. So here’s the specific version: four phases, each one a wider circle of people, each one with a question I need answered before the next.

Phase one — friends and family. That’s today. People who know me are getting access, which means the feedback will be generous and a little unreliable — friends forgive things strangers won’t. That’s fine, because this phase isn’t about product-market anything. It’s about finding out whether onboarding works on someone else’s laptop, whether the encryption flow makes sense to a person who didn’t write it, and which of my assumptions were just familiarity. I need the embarrassing bugs found by people who’ll text me instead of leaving.

Phase two — ten strangers, free forever. Lifetime access, no charge, for ten people I don’t know. Ten is small on purpose: I want to actually read everything they say and reply to it, and that stops being possible somewhere past a dozen. The trade is explicit — you get the tool for good, I get your honest reaction to it, including the parts where you tried it for three days and stopped. Especially that part.

Phase three — twenty dollars, lifetime. Same deal, but paid. A one-time $20 for permanent access, to a second round of people I don’t know. Money changes feedback: the moment someone pays, even a little, they start evaluating the thing instead of doing me a favor. I also want to find out whether anyone will pay at all before I go build a subscription business on the assumption that they will. Twenty dollars is deliberately cheap against what it becomes later — that discount is what I’m paying for the honesty.

Phase four — general availability. The real launch: open signup, the regular subscription, the pricing that’s on this site. By then the product should have survived three rounds of people who owed me nothing, and I should know what it’s actually for — not what I assumed it was for in a sprint two years ago.

Somewhere in there I want a community, and I’ve picked Discord for it. Not because the world needs another server, but because the alternative is feedback arriving as scattered DMs and emails that only I can see. In a Discord, a person hitting a rough edge finds the three people who already hit it, I answer once instead of five times, and the roadmap argument happens in public where I can be talked out of things. The early members will have disproportionate influence over what this becomes, which is the honest recruiting pitch — the room is small and the shaping is real.

I’ll be blunt about the risk: this could stall at phase two. Ten strangers is a low bar and I might still miss it, or hit it and find that nine of them never come back. That’s the point of doing it in this order — each phase is cheap enough to fail without taking the next one down with it.

Phase one is live today. If you’re reading this because I sent it to you: thank you, please break it, and tell me the thing you’re worried is too petty to mention. It isn’t.