How to run a beta phase with your blockchain product launch!

A progress report of Wave 2 of the closed beta on herosphere.gg!

As CEO of HERO I am very proud to share my thoughts 3 weeks into our current HEROcoin (PLAY) closed beta on herosphere.gg and give you a little outlook.

Paul Polterauer, CEO

These are exciting times, as we are very proud to not only have been listed on a major exchange, relaunch our esports prediction & fantasy platform but also bring a product on the blockchain only 8 months after ICO.

We decided on a launch strategy that guarantees our customer focus and gives us the chance to learn from the user rather than building something in our silo. So we planned to start with a closed beta and proceed in waves. Anyone could sign up as beta user on a dedicated sign-up webpage. We randomly chose participants to test the platform, report bugs and give us feedback. Wave users get an invite email with a list of tasks and the link to a detailed BETA guideline as well as the description of the reward system — plus they have to join a closed telegram group. Each bug reported is being tagged as a major, minor or mini bug and reward sums defined accordingly.

This keeps our focus on the customer and gives us the chance to constantly question what we have developed. Often in Blockchain development there is no comparable use case, no common knowledge on how to do things, so we have build a lot from scratch and therefore need community feedback and slowly do things right from beginning on.

Closed beta wave 1 start

Our first wave was launched on end of June 2018 and ended two weeks after — which was just a few days ago. We had about 20 motivated users from around the world who reported bugs and requested features. This was fully running on testnet with Ropsten ETH & Ropsten PLAY. Therefore we also provided each user with a individual Ropsten wallet on myetherwallet.com.

Our developers solved the bugs on the fly as they were coming in. We also collected at lot of general feedback & feature requests, which will be evaluated and then step by step integrated in our scrum process, depending on urgency & priority.

The bug progress can be followed live by every user in order to check their reward balance.

Slowly increasing number of test users

On July 11th, we sent out the invitations for the second wave, which added about 50 new users to test HEROcoin (PLAY) on herosphere.gg. They create their on-platform wallet, transfer Ropsten ETH and PLAY to it, buy into contests, play fantasy & bet on matches, get a ranking and potentially pay outs if they win.

What is so special about the wallet creation process, that we let the user, is the fact that we managed to develop a unique solution on how to maximize user experience and ensure the highest standard of security for a platform integrated ERC20 wallet. My team will also put this into a blog post to explain some technical details that will be published soon.

After the second wave, we are going to invite another even bigger group of users for wave 3 and might switch to Mainnet already.

Outlook — Mainnet?

If we need more testruns we are going to add more waves but that depends on the feedback received until then.

After the closed beta ends we are planning on heading straight to the open beta after all bugs have been fixed. This means anyone can bet with their PLAY on herosphere.gg.

Due to our wave structure and the unknown amount of bugs we can’t give an exact timetable yet but we will most certainly keep you posted on all of our channels. So far we have had about 200 bug submissions, where about a third is on feature requests and out of all reported bugs about a fourth has been been verified and fixed already.

Compared to wave 1 we have already improved information flow during the wallet creation process, PLAY balance bugs, mobile display issues and login problems. But we still have a few more important improvements to work on just as batch transactions to lower transaction costs with pay outs and series contests (instead of a whole tournament as one contest).

We hope that this gives you an idea about the structure and the procedure of the closed beta.

This is a major step for us and the whole Blockchain community. It shows how much a dedicated dev team can achieve when the focus is right. Thanks to this testing process, we are able to build a Blockchain betting platform that is for the community and satisfies users needs to its best! Plus allows us to proof the concept when approaching third party betting providers.