Justin Britten

A Private Web Beta in Seconds with Prefinery

Don’t write it yourself

You’ve got some slick new Web site and you’d like to run a private beta.  Maybe this is because you’re convinced your site is so awesome you’re going to get more traffic than your ready for.  Or, maybe you’d just like to work out the bugs with a small, select group of users.  Either way, you need a process for collecting the e-mail addresses for people who are interested in signing up, generating unique invitation codes, and sending an e-mail invitation.

This process is a pain in the ass, and not something core to your awesome new web site.  Heck, you’ll probably only be in private beta for a few months so you’ll end up throwing away all the code you write to manage the private beta.

Prefinery can manage this entire process for you.  Here’s how it works …

1.  Sign up for a free Prefinery account

You specify what contact information (name, email, address, phone, etc.) must be gathered when users request an invitation code.

2.  Install the invitation widget

This is as easy as copying and pasting a few lines of Javascript.

3.  Users visit your web site and request an invitation code

The Prefinery invitation widget gets launched when a user clicks a link or image on your site.  Your users never leave your web site!

4.  Poof, an invitation code is generated

You log into Prefinery where you see the thousands of people who are begging to use your awesome new site.  Approving access is as easy as clicking a button.  Once access is approved, an e-mail (from your address, of course) is sent to the user.

5.  Users sign up on your site

We give you the secret formula so that you can decode a Prefinery invitation code when users sign up on your site. We provide code samples in various languages, including Ruby, PHP, and Python.  In most cases this process is as simple as one line of source code.

Learn more

You can learn more about Prefinery by taking the tour, checking out the screenshots, or signing up for a free account.