HACKER Q&A
📣 flerovium

Unreleased Products


In the past few months, especially with AI, there have been a lot of posts "[company] releases [product]", where a company has not in fact released a product—they're just testing it with their friends in closed alpha/beta; you click through and it's just an email signup waitlist to be notified when the product is ready.

Is there some kind of flag or tag for these? How can I distinguish real releases from "we're in testing"/"we will release soon" announcements?

Can we start tagging these?


  👤 version_five Accepted Answer ✓
> They're just testing it with their friends in closed alpha/beta;

That's being generous. I know I've read "startup advice" to make a landing page with your idea and get signups, and then build it only if it gets some interest. I don't think that's good advice for fields that evolve daily anyway, by the time you gauge interest, the world will have moved on or someone else will have built the product.


👤 mtmail
They're not allowed as Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) but it's not always clear-cut. If the product has a video walk-through for example it's more real than just a page full of text (promises).

👤 XCSme
Is it Vaporware[0] stuff?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware