convore.json/groups/hacker-news/when-to-open-an-unproven-application-to-the-public/messages.json

[{"user_id": 4374, "stars": [], "topic_id": 19408, "date_created": 1302789268.5217659, "message": "A friend and I quit our programming jobs to do a startup a few months ago. We're flying 100% by the seats of our pants, and we've built something which we believe people will really enjoy using. The small group of friends we've been testing it with have really enjoyed it. It's a real-time application that streams video/audio from \"user A\" to all the other users connected to it (highly simplified explanation). Any of you guys have experience with building a very small, core userbase to test an unproven system like ours? Or just general advice?", "group_id": 95, "id": 684897}, {"user_id": 27941, "stars": [], "topic_id": 19408, "date_created": 1302792003.2977209, "message": "I could share our experience with virtualrockstars.com  We started with friends only as well and had coded premium accounts into the web app from day one. We didn't even know if we ever are going to offer pay-premium accounts but I knew that it was a great way to have another layer of users. It turned out to be a perfect tool to make our hardcore fans premium users and let them have access to new features or at the beginning those were the ones that got to use the web app before we opened to the public. Now you might wonder how we got these fans in the first place?! ...well the answer is: twitter and other social networks that we used to build an audience while writing the first lines of code. The people that got super interested in what we were building were the first premium users, aka outside testers.", "group_id": 95, "id": 685693}]