How We Got Our First 200+ Beta Testers (Key Takeaways)
I’ve seen many indie product creators or team members work on their product/SaaS for months and after developing it, they mostly don’t know how to get their first beta testers. 🤷
Getting your first early users is probably one of the most daunting tasks for most of the people unless you have an experienced team or have done it before.
Ugly Realization:
After working for 9 months on Pixelied, we were over the moon but reality hit us hard since we knew nothing on how to get our early users to use/test our platform. 😬
At this stage, our only goal was to get specific feedback from our users and how Pixelied can help in their business. The reason for this was because we needed to know how our initial users would react to our design tool.
The feedback which we got from our first beta testers proved to be immensely helpful as it allowed us to see get feedback from a user’s perspective and what changes we had to do in order to make the app usable.
How We Did It:
These are the methods we followed that got us our first 200+ users:
- Post on IndieHackers
- Post on Subreddits
- Post on Active Facebook Groups (Don’t spam, first ask permission from group admins)
- Submit your Product on Betalist (We got most of our users from Betalist)
Alternative Traffic Channels:
I haven't personally used these traffic channels but you can explore and they might bring extra traction and users for your startup.
Here is the list:
- Trendy Startups
- Hacker News
- Quora
- Beta Bound
- Personal outreach via Linkedin, Twitter and Instagram
We also gave users a 3 months Pro access for Pixelied with all the features and updates. I’ve seen some startups give lifetime access or free access for a long period of time.
We used Google Forms and Skype for conducting feedback for our platform.
Conclusion
There are surely thousand other ways you could get your beta testers but I just focused on a few channels which provided us with good results.
Here is the amount of traffic which we have been able to get from the above channels: https://imgur.com/a/Tu5gVHc
I would love to know which other methods have worked in getting the initial traction for your product 😉
I have written a more detailed post about this on Medium with all the stats, groups and subreddits we used.
Head over here if would like an in-depth case study: https://bit.ly/34aiNBF
