Have you ever ignored alpha/beta test results? What happened next?

I’ll go first.

This was at a previous company, selling B2B SaaS infrastructure. We had strong early traction, a few marquis accounts and constant user feedback. One theme kept popping up: people loved the idea and related to the need — but when they tried to use the product in certain ways, it didn't easily do what it was supposed to.

But the demos worked. They were great at selling early in the funnel. We leaned on that.

Under the hood, though? The product was brittle — hard-wired, full of technical debt, and increasingly built to fit whatever deal we were chasing that quarter. If people did buy it, it required a bunch of technical service hours just to make it usable.

The company downplayed the feedback. Kept the roadmap reactive. Told ourselves we'd clean it up later.

But then the pattern emerged: deals would go long, get serious… and then stall.

No matter how sharp our materials were, the product faded in the stretch. The weaknesses were always exposed in later-stage evaluations.

The signs were there. We just didn’t listen.

So I’m curious — have you ever ignored early feedback or beta signals?

What happened when you pushed forward anyway? Hopefully it went better for you than it did for me!