I'm part of a relatively new startup (jut.io). We're building an analytics platform focused on ingesting operational data (logs, statsd metrics, collectd, alerts). Our secret sauce is a dataflow-driven analytics approach that works really well for both live and historical data. We believe our market is code-centric ops people and developers who also do ops.<p>Currently our strategy consists of:<p>(1) Hosting an online playground where anyone can use our dataflow language/visualizations without deploying anything (http://www.jut.io/play);<p>(2) Showing common use cases in action in that environment;<p>(3) Creating content showing examples of how you might use us.<p>My question:<p>What would convince you to sign up to beta a product like this?
Focus on pain and fear.<p>For example, I'm the sole technical person for a number of projects. I leave my phone on at night, so that I can be alerted if things go terribly wrong.<p>That's both a pain and a fear. It's painful to be on-call all the time, and I'm afraid due to being the single point of failure, as well as the person responsible for cleaning up a mess.<p>(I'm lucky to live in a time when there are great tools available to make problems extremely rare, but you get my point.)<p>If someone pitched me: "Turn your phone off at night", that'd really hit home for me.<p>You need to find a similar way to illustrate how you're going to alleviate a pain point.