Alpha launch

With that simple tweet, the site is live to the world!

In reality, very few people will actually see this message. Which is a good thing...for now. The site is relatively complete, the hallway usability testing is done, the domain is set. Now the goal is to gather feedback from a slightly broader audience, while still maintaining its semi-private status, as I work on SEO and the feedback I receive at this stage.

Step 1 was to broadcast to my Twitter follower. I have very few, so I'm not too worried about it spreading too far and wide (though I wouldn't mind :). Step 2 was to email some friends and family. I put together a list of about 10-20 people and emailed them the following message:

I promise this won't take more then about 5 minutes of your time, and hopefully will be useful to you at some point.

Here's the pitch: Do you ever have to call internationally, but forget the country codes you need to use? Do you Google around looking for the info every time, trying to make sense of the random sites out there? I've created http://www.howtodialinternationally.com/ to make this process as easy as humanly possible.

What would be really helpful for me at this pooint:
1. Check out the site (http://www.howtodialinternationally.com/), play with it as if you were looking to make a call someplace.
2. Tell me what you think as a whole, whether you think you'd find this useful.
3. Note any suggestions/comments/bugs that come up as you use the site.

It's an extremely simple idea (and site), so I'm hoping this only takes a few minutes of your time.

I'm looking forward to hearing what you think!
Lenny

The things I'm looking to get out of this round of testing:

1. General feedback on whether the idea makes sense to them, and whether or not it will be useful.
2. Usability input. Though this is hard to get asynchronously. I plan to do more real time usability testing to improve on this.
3. Bugs.
4. Ideas for improvements.

Once I've gathered the feedback from this round and implemented the ideas that come out of it, the final step before launching to a broader audience will be solidifying the SEO elements. I need to finalize the keywords and phrases I plan to focus on, and update the site with the SEO tips and tricks I've collected.

P.S. I've added some new tracking to the site. I've had Google Analytics running for a while, and now I've added Clicky as well. I plan to create a future post discussing the various analytics options out there, but this becomes important only after you've actually launched.