For the earliest of early adopters, the concept of a service like LaunchSet sounds like being buddies with the biggest, coolest club promoter in town: Get a first look at pre-launch sites for testing and feedback before anyone else on the block.
For already stressed startups, LaunchSet provides a valuable service: Management of registrations and analytics during the packed-to-the-gills months, weeks, and days between launching private and public versions of a site or app.
Founder Danny Roa is a San Francisco-based Python/Django/.Net developer. He was also one of the minds behind Hubb.me, a product of this spring’s Startup Weekend in San Francisco.
His pitch for the site is simple: Launchset will manage your site’s closed alpha/beta registration system, including invitation codes, email addresses, waiting lists, and/or parameters such as having users follow the startup’s account on Twitter or add the app or company on Facebook before gaining access to the app or site.
“Some sites want to slowly roll out their release to the public,” he wrote on the LaunchSet site. “This can be done by collecting email addresses from users and manually giving them access to the site. Some sites build functionality that would give out and take invitation codes.
“While these are not insanely hard to code, this functionality is disposed of when the time has come to launch openly to the public.”
So why make each individual startup do something that only needs to be done once? Why reinvent the wheel?
Roa wrote that he got the idea to start this service as he was trying to create a way to grant limited access to just a few users while working on another project – perhaps Hubb.me.
In addition to allowing startups to specify exactly how many users they want to give access to for their private launches, LaunchSet can also help sites target a particular set of users once their “talent pool” of ubergeeks grows a bit more.
The idea is that by using LaunchSet, not only will the invitation/registration process become much easier for startups to manage; they’ll also be able to see how many people are interested in your site either by how many people following it or how many users are waiting to get access.
LaunchSet went live in July. Sites can sign up here, and early-adopting end users can register here. Kudos to Roa for executing a great idea that simply solves a simple problem and that has the potential to make a lot of people very happy.
