Earlyvangelist: Why Alpha Users Beat Beta for Customer Development
Thank God for users who grab you by the collar and tell you what's broken.
By Tristan Kromer · 
What does earlyvangelist mean? This week I was incredibly excited to be ambushed at Startup Waffles by a couple of users who told me how many things we needed to fix in order to make the site usable. All of the points were right on. What thrilled me about the conversation with Ron and Eugene was that they were passionate enough about the concept of startupSQUARE to put up with all the problems and open enough to talk to me about it. I can’t stress enough how important the feedback we keep receiving is. Our site needs a commitment to feedback and constant improvement in order to be a great resource for entrepreneurs.
Quick Answer: An earlyvangelist is an early adopter passionate enough about your product concept to tolerate bugs and usability issues while actively telling you what’s broken. As product managers, we should release to these committed users as early as possible — alpha beats beta — because their honest, sometimes unsolicited feedback prevents us from spending months building features based on our own assumptions. The key is choosing dedicated users over casual tourists, while being careful not to dismiss negative feedback as coming from outside your target market.
Alpha is better than Beta
Our alpha users are valuable. Without them, we’d spend months building features no one really wants based on nothing more than our own wild assumptions. The best thing we could have done for our site is to release it to as many earlyvangelist as possible to get a broad range of feedback.
Choose Your Customers Wisely
By “as many as possible”, I don’t mean to just anyone. I know that there are many advocates for having an open site as early as possible. In many cases that’s probably correct, particularly if you have a consumer product. We don’t. Our customers are entrepreneurs and we’re not too interested in _maybe_preneurs. A _maybe_preneur is an entrepreneur who might start a company if only they had more time. He/she could clearly strike it rich if he/she just had funding. A _maybe_preneur is someone who specializes in excuses rather than action. It remains our mission to increase the success rate of entrepreneurship, and we’d like to do that for everyone. Everyone out there can start a business and be successful. But that starts with the entrepreneur and their commitment to the process. As a result, anyone who comes off in our application as a tourist just looking around has to go to the back of the line for a while. Sorry! We’ll open it up eventually to everyone, but right now we’re looking for dedicated entrepreneurs willing to share their ideas and their advice, not only with us, but with other users. We’re looking to build a community. That means sharing.
Selection Bias
This is going to give us a selection bias in our feedback. That’s clear. It’s a fine line between honing our demographic and only hearing what we want to hear. So we have to be very careful about not discarding negative feedback and claiming that it came from someone outside our target market. We’re fortunate that our early adopters/earlyvangelist are the ones who are passionate enough to grab us by the collar if necessary and get us moving in the right direction when we go astray. So thank you to Ron and Eugene for putting me in my place!
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an earlyvangelist and why do they matter for startups?
An earlyvangelist is an early adopter who is passionate enough about your product concept to put up with bugs and usability problems while actively providing feedback. As product managers, we value earlyvangelists because they’ll grab us by the collar and tell us what’s broken, helping us build what users actually need instead of spending months on features based on our own assumptions.
Why should you release to alpha users instead of waiting for a polished beta?
Alpha users help us avoid building features no one wants based on wild assumptions. By releasing early to earlyvangelists, we get a broad range of real feedback that drives constant improvement. Waiting for a polished beta means months of development in the dark, while alpha feedback keeps us moving in the right direction from day one.
How do you choose the right early adopters for customer development?
We should target users who are genuinely committed to the problem space, not casual tourists. In the article’s case, that meant dedicated entrepreneurs willing to share ideas and advice — not “maybepreneurs” who specialize in excuses rather than action. Choosing committed early users helps build community and generates higher-quality, more actionable feedback.
How do you avoid selection bias when filtering early users?
Curating early adopters creates a real risk of only hearing what we want to hear. We need to be very careful not to discard negative feedback by claiming it came from someone outside our target market. The key is walking the fine line between honing our demographic and maintaining openness to critical, uncomfortable feedback that challenges our assumptions.
What is reverse customer development?
Reverse customer development is when users proactively ambush you with feedback rather than you seeking them out through structured interviews. It happens when earlyvangelists are passionate enough about your concept to voluntarily tell you everything that needs fixing. This kind of unsolicited, honest feedback is incredibly valuable because it reflects genuine user commitment to your product’s success.
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