Hate to give away our secrets, but if your product takes the form of an npm library, get you a canary build script. You should be able to push a button and get the user a build from trunk, fully automated. One of the best effort-to-value things I've ever built: github.com/rocicorp/mon...

Am I understanding this right — your script publishes a build to NPM that anyone can download, but isn't the latest build (so users won't install it automatically)?

Yep, npm has a feature where you can give builds tags. The “latest” tag is the default and what people get when they install without any version specifier. But you can create other labels. We have a “canary” label we push to between releases which people can install like “@rocicorp/zero@canary”