Early Access 101: How to Build Products People Love

The faster you can build, the faster you need to learn. Sam and I built Beam because we kept opening Screen Sharing to reach one app on another Mac. We thought the problem might be pretty niche.

I asked people on 𝕏 how they used their other Macs. The responses introduced us to setups we hadn't considered and helped us find people who already had a reason to try Beam. We invited some of them into early access.

Real work exposed problems our testing had missed. One tester appreciated the lower resource use but couldn't rely on mouse clicks landing in the right place. Other people struggled with permissions and sleeping Macs. Sam kept shipping improvements, and some early users eventually said they were choosing Beam instead of Screen Sharing.

On Friday I'll show the original posts, first-use reports and product releases. We'll look at how we found early users, what their real work exposed and how we decided which problems to address. I'll also show how to check whether those changes actually helped.

You'll leave with a six-play early-access process and a one-page field card for your own product. You can start before there's software to test or use it to improve a product people already use.