The whole purpose of a beta demo of a product of this nature is to show how great it will be on release in order to entice folks to purchase it, to show the users how wonderful your customer service is, and to address and squash the odd bug. In the event of a free product the goal is much the same, to show you how great it is and that you can't live without it.
It's all about marketing and demoing your future product to the masses in order to create hype as well as word of mouth advertisement. This is the stage at which word of mouth advertising can make or break you.
While I think the concept behind Woopra is great, so far I haven't seen anything to make me think its worth a darn.
Firstly, it doesn't work.. I have installed the product exactly as the instructions say, as well as installed the client. The client appears to function but only a hand full of "hits" are trickling in.. When my other logging tools as well as my own testing of my log files show that a lot more hits are coming in. (Domain aliasing doesn't appear to work what so ever.)
That could be forgiven or called a bug if there was a method by which we could address such issues or ask questions.
The email that I received with my enable codes said to post on the forums ... which I have done, but no official replies have come in. Ever. It appears that no questions are answered on the forums PERIOD. Browse the other questions and count how many are actually addressed by a mod or a woopra employee..etc..
So clearly the forums aren't the right place to ask questions.
In order to cover all my bases I also sent an email directly to the folks at woopra and copied myself asking some of the same questions I have, and that I have seen on the forums..
Nothing. No reply.
If the purpose of a beta program is to show folks how hot your product is -- how poor does it make your product look then if it doesn't work the way you say it should, and you don't ever answer questions?
So secondly, the customer service appears to be non-existant and thirdly, bugs galore which should have been addressed via the internal alpha, during the QA process or prior to beta at the very least.
The experience I am taking away from this is a poor one. Why would I use Woopra? Why would I suggest to others that they need to use it? In fact, why would I not tell others I know in the industry to avoid it completely? etc..
If you want woopra to be a success you have to bend over backwards to your users, and do it now.
More over you should do it such that when the product does go live I can tell folks "sure it has some initial issues, but man their tech support was on the ball!".. I can't say that now. As it stands now your complete lack of support is going to doom your product.
At this point, as an average user all I can say is to others who ask is that it's not a good service because it doesn't work, and there appears to be no way to address the issues.
I welcome official comments -- though for some reason I feel like this thread will get deleted..
