It's a shame that a product that probably took 7- or 8-figure dollars worth of development effort, didn't have some beta testers do a once-over on the documentation.
The archived site emphasizes that "this is a beta version, and there are a lot of known bugs." It's not unreasonable to assume they intended to do more with it.
You just have to be sure you don't eliminate the customer support with documentation, and then not ever fix the problem. I think it's better to feel the pain in the short run, and have a better product in the long run.
This reminds me of another thing we do - when we make new apps, we don't provide a manual to the beta group. We make one after the fact, but we want to get feedback from users as if there are no instructions.
Your product is awesome btw. We use it in two apps, and plan to add it to a third soon.
Thanks so much for writing all this down, this is extremely useful!
You are right, the documentation is incomplete and there are still lots of issues, the next week's update will fix some of the above and make it a more stable and proper 'beta'.
I'm assuming since this is beta they probably guessed enough of the users who want this are technically capable of managing without a UI during testing.
There was an internal beta for over a year now. And our approach changed twice over those 3 years.
A product which is so complex and aimed at businesses can't be 'bootstrapped' in 3 months and launched. The result would be that nobody would care about it because it would be incomplete and wouldn't cater to their needs. There are a lot of such products and nobody remembers about them. I hope our effort will pay off, and that's what our current testers are telling me :)
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