Someone pass the comically sized scissors. Six months since our Alpha went live, and right on schedule according to our roadmap, we’re cutting the ribbon and declaring that Just About is in Beta! Our tech team has been hard at work on updates to bring us across the threshold we set for ourselves, and we believe we’re there. 

Here’s exactly what that means, and what’s coming next.

What Beta is

The final update of our Alpha went live last week, stripping ‘alpha’ from our URL. We’re on the world wide web now, and our bounties and curated articles are visible to non-members, helping us to catch the interest of passing internetters. If they want to participate, however, or browse our discussions, they’ll need to join the platform.

This update follows a number of others that have been building the Beta ship over the past few weeks. To recap, these are all the things Just About now does which we consider to be part of Beta, and show the progress we’ve made since our Alpha launched in June:

• Content: Our communities have been creating content of all types, including guides, clips, news, and reactions - and these are now viewable to the wider internet 🎥

• Bounties: These opportunities for members to earn rewards are also now publicly visible, without needing to sign up 📣

• Moderation: Our auto-moderator, JAutoMod, is fully functional across all discussions and keeping our members safe 🤖 

• Organic rewards: Members are rewarded for their positive participation in a community, not just from bounties 💰

• No wait list: Speedier signup flow, so new members can get into the platform faster 🚪

• Plus countless bug fixes, page-speed and stability updates, and other optimisations 🐛

What we’ve learned

Besides a more complete product, we’ve got a bigger and wiser team, thanks to lessons learned and colleagues hired. 

Alongside our friendly community we’ve tested hundreds of different bounties, gathering and crunching the data from all of them. With our pathfinders in Just About EVE Online, Video Games, and Content Curators, we’ll soon be launching new communities and keeping our bounty schedules fresh for the long term. 

We’ve hired some brilliant folks into the tech team to keep us building, and Jason and Nicole to manage and grow our communities ahead of the next phase.

What’s next

We have one big goal for 2024: growth. Our membership grows by the day, but with these changes we can shift gears and make a big push. We’ve got Nicole leading the charge - see her recent departmental deep dive for how she’ll do it - and Jason, with his robot assistant JAutoMod, to maintain the good vibes no matter how big we get. 

The fact that bounties and curated content are now publicly visible, and our signup flow so much smoother, will unlock many more tactics on social media and give us more to show to potential partners.

As the game industry digests its Christmas and an extremely difficult 2023, we’ll look to deliver on the Beta and 2024 goals set out in our roadmap. Expect more game-specific communities, the handover of more mature communities to the membership, more platform integrations, and, well, everything else.

A little celebration…

All of this kicks off in January. In the meantime, we’re doing plenty to celebrate Beta and the end of the year. As mentioned last week, we’ve got plenty of festive bounties going on, and another exciting announcement today: we’re doubling organic rewards for the next month!

Check here for a recap of how these work, but TL;DR: the most engaged-with comments each day will see a little extra cash enter their authors’ Just About wallets. So come back to the platform - or get involved if for you haven’t already - and get something back for helping us make the best community on the internet.

From all of us at Just About, another enormous thank-you to everyone who’s brought the platform this far. Here’s to the next chapter together!

Let's go!