How do you maintain an e-mail list while the product is still being developed?
Title is self-explanatory — do you e-mail them content relevant to your service? Would that deter them away from your service? Honestly, the questions I have are endless, would like to get your take on this!
About to give this a try, actually. I just added the documentation for Nodewood and I'm going to email my list of people who signed up for product updates. I plan on asking for feedback on the documentation, see if anything's confusing, if they want more information about how certain things work, etc.
We'll see if I a) get any feedback, and b) get any unsubscribes!
I would send regular emails with the progress of the products and potentially add in some way to get user feedback (Maybe with screenshots of what is to come).
If you already have an audience but don't have a finished product I think it would be beneficial to get more market research as it could help you develop a feature that everyone wants or avoid building one nobody wants.
Good luck.
I'd sign this. Product updates are the primary intention of such a beta product newsletter. If you happen to have some cool insight on the topic that you can convert into actual content, that's amazing, but it's also secondary.
Product updates seem like a good idea. There are definitely tons of features that can be added but development skills are a limiting factor so I'm rolling out an MVP soon to see how it goes.