Soft launch is when you make it available to the public for a while before advertising it.
Thank you that makes sense. Everyone else wrote too many paragraphs. I like your eli5 explanation.
Think of it as early access vs full release.
From the hotel industry point of view it is allowing guests to stay for a little bit to make sure processes work before launching the advertising campaigns and allowing room booking from wotif or booking.com
I’ve worked in software development professionally and I am working on some personal projects that I am going eventually share and try to get known.
Soft launch is when you make something available, but either allow something to just be encounterable, either through the system you are working in , or through search engines and whatnot. The main motive of this is when you have reached a state where it can be used, but you do not want it to be under scrutiny, and to get some feedback from initial users, and to see if it will work as expected in a live environment.
A “Hard” launch is when you work on publicity, announcements, buy advertising, and generally try to get people to all come and see/use the thing you have completed. There is a release date and you are actively trying to attract people to the thing.
For example, I’m slowly working my way up the release state for the microtonal grid.
The first stage of soft launch was just uploading it to Itch.io , without it being listed properly or on the recommendation engine listings. Then I enabled it to be seen through those categories. Then I started posting about it on lemmy. I still need to work on trying to reach out to Xenharmonic wiki to list it on their pages of tools or some kind of use through there. I want to start documenting my projects I am working on in videos and upload them to a schedule.
The things I need to will keep making the release “harder”.
Think of it in terms of video games. Soft-launch is like an Early Access game. It’s very explicitly not feature complete, lacks the refinement of a finished product, and exists as a kind of crowdsourced quality assurance tool to figure out what works, what doesn’t, and gauge the opinion of people who aren’t professional developers who may have biases and blind spots as someone who understands the product at a deep level. A soft launch usually has minimal if any marketing done, and explicitly targets people with special interest in the product, while the hard launch is the polished final product and gets a much wider marketing push.
