It’s been a hectic couple of weeks here at this little Two-Bit Operation. We set up a new web hosting server in preparation for running a private beta test, but as always, the process took longer than we had anticipated. Recently I’d been telling people that they’d be able to check out the beta by August, but due to server issues August 1st came and went, and we weren’t ready yet. After a number of long days we finally pushed our private beta out the door right before the stroke of midnight on the 8th, which was our revised target date. It was both wonderful and scary to finally share with a large group the project that we’d been spending so much of our time in for the past few months.
We felt that having a private beta test was absolutely critical to our business, as it’d be our last chance to make any major changes (both for the site and the business direction) before opening it to the general public. We had a couple of goals for the beta:
- Solicit feedback and suggestions.
- Build a base of data – user contributions help our site, and we wanted to get the process started.
- Publicize – a beta test is one of the first steps in a long road of publicing and marketing our site.
- Test our systems – this is possibly the most overlooked aspect of having a beta. Since there’s just two of us, we need to be sure we’re ready to handle all the issues that might occur when running the site.
So far the beta’s been going well, and we’ve been receiving a ton of good feedback, which just makes us busier than ever. I guess it’s a good problem to have. 
 Stay tuned, we’ll have more updates about the beta process as it continues…
-JL
Yay! Congrats and Great Job.
You guys have done an incredible amount of quality work. It’s pretty impressive! (and I’m not a PM or manager so that is not just some standard rah-rah… 
)
Well you have peaked my curiosity. I cannot wait to find out what you have been developing. I just found your site today– so maybe if I continue to review your achieves I will find a clue.
You try looking in the archives, but I think we’ve been pretty good at not revealing anything
Stay tuned – it’s not too much longer (if we can meet our own deadlines). Subscribe to the email updates or to the RSS feed and we’ll definitely announce on here when we’ve launched!
Thanks for reading.
congrats on teh site launched. Just wondering how long was the development process of the site?
Maybe about 5-6 months? We started the company in Feb. and development got going probably around March after taking some time to come up to speed on Ruby on Rails. We also had a little break during the summer after we burned out a bit.