Ask HN: E-mail invites to our closed alpha. How to gather? How to send?
As my co-founder and I finish work on our prototype, we're setting up a closed alpha version that we can invite people to participate in for initial testing. We'd like to have a long list of e-mail addresses, from people wanting to participate, waiting for us when we're ready; so that means updating our neglected holding page with something beautiful, interesting, and presumably containing some kind of "Enter your e-mail address for an alpha invite" form.
Rather than re-invent the wheel, do you have any recommendations for back-end tools meant for this purpose? What's the best way we can gather (opt-in) e-mail addresses from visitors, store them, and then use them later to send out invite codes/links?
Thanks in advance for all recommendations & tips!
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And once you've collected the names, you could use something like http://campaignmonitor.com/ to send email blasts.
edit: BTW: it's free
both look pretty good though..
Ask yourself: do I want to associate my brand with the product in it's current state? If it is alpha quality but you still want feedback, think damage limitation. It's no accident that programs get code names: you associate all of your alpha woes with a brand you can throw away.
So we're keeping the alpha closed at first, so we can fix things and grow our userbase to a decent size without embarrassing ourselves. We do want to open up as soon as possible after that.