How To Run A Beta Test... Or Not?: "I had high hopes for this beta test. It was a 0.1 upgrade release of a product I'd been selling for 3 years. Most of the bugs had already been squashed, so I intended to spend most of my time surveying testers and soliciting ideas for improvements. I thought I could build word-of-mouth by using a large beta testing team. The expectation was that this would be a very quick and simple beta.

Oh man. How wrong could I have been?"