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Celi's beta test is live, now what?

Dissecting Celi's 91-person proof-of-concept beta test and detailing what comes next

Author

Ricki Crowley
June 06, 2023

Celi’s proof-of-concept beta test has been live since April. Here are some stats at the 3-month mark:

  • Monthly Active Users: 91

  • Compound Monthly Growth Rate: 55.93%

  • Viral Coefficient: 3.25

  • Churn: 0%

  • SMS Delivery Rate: 100%

  • Email Open Rate: 84.26%

  • New Product Launches: 1*

  • Events Celebrated: 44

  • Average Dates Per Person: 7.37

  • Waitlist: 212

  • User Age Range: 13 - 64

*Monthly Digest is a once-monthly notification including all of your connection’s upcoming celebrations for the month ahead as well as a curation of notable holidays and observances.

Throughout the beta test, I’ve received unsolicited encouragement from active users about their Celi experience.

Aware that as founder and author I am an unreliable narrator, my hope is my track record of transparency and scrutiny of Celi yields a trust strong enough to accept the authenticity of these:

Lastly, this proof-of-concept beta test has strengthed some of Celi’s original theses:

  • The 7.37 average dates per person confirm the importance and value of beyond the birthday events.

  • The 3.25 viral coefficient confirms that Celi’s natural external network effects set Celi up for slingshot-like growth.

  • User feedback confirms that Celi will be as important a part of your personal tech stack as your phone’s digital contact book.

You can revisit each of the 18 theses here.

What comes next

Now that the Celi proof-of-concept beta test is a living organism, it’s my intention to grow Celi like cordyceps.

Or as you may know it, the zombie fungus that inspired HBO’s The Last of Us.

With that being said, a proof-of-concept beta test is only a controlled snapshot and the rational founder should expect its success to dilute once a public product is built, while at the same time working aggressively to maintain it.

Nonetheless, it’s encouraging enough to keep going.

What then, does it look like to keep going?

  1. Introducing gifting to Celi as our second product launch.

  2. Producing a detailed technical requirement of the Celi build and having advisors review it to better understand the cost of building Celi’s public version.

  3. Drafting Celi’s growth strategy with a focus on the brute-force kickoff and overcoming the cold start problem.

Once this is complete, it’s likely I will graduate from bootstrapping to raise a pre-seed or seed round, first offering the opportunity to the 73 people who expressed the desire to be considered for investment in March’s The Celi Survey, before expanding out.

Until the cold pitches of a fundraise, the work above is quiet. During this time I also plan to publish several personal essays about my experience building Celi in public.

If you’ve ever read one of my soberversary pieces, you know what to expect.

Some of the titles in my drafts folder include:

  • Why I Can’t Build A Company

  • The Reminders I Tell Myself While Building A Company

  • Why Celi Matters

There will also be a private thank you letter to each beta tester.

I recognize the ask I’ve made of Celi’s beta testers.

Already I’ve asked them to commit their time to me. Soon, I’ll expand that to ask them to offer their reputation by inviting friends to the public launch. Between now and then, I’ll probably ask them to change and save Celi’s phone number, take a user experience survey, and continue testing early generations of an incomplete product.

But today, none of those asks are present.

To anyone eager to help today, I have only two asks:

  • Join the beta test - If you have a friend group of 5- 15 people and want to participate in Celi’s proof-of-concept beta test, please reply and I’ll build your cohort.

  • Follow Celi’s social media accounts:

Definitions to better interpret the proof-of-concept beta test data:

  • Monthly Active User (MAU) measures the number of individuals who actively interact with a product or service within a monthly timeframe.

  • Compound Monthly Growth Rate (CMGR) is a metric used to calculate the average growth rate of a quantity over a series of consecutive monthly periods, taking compounding into account. It is commonly employed to analyze the growth or decline of a user base.

  • Viral Coefficient measures the average number of new users that a single active user generates and is used to quantify the virality or the growth potential of a product or service. A viral coefficient greater than 1 indicates exponential growth, as each user, on average, brings in more than one new user.

  • Churn represents the rate at which users discontinue using a product or service from a company's existing customer base.