Acquiring your first beta users
I've stumbled across a few questions in the community asking about strategies to acquire initial beta users.
Throughout the initial phases, it can be challenging to source users willing to register for your product and share honest feedback.
I'd recently published a case study sharing how I acquired my first users for my community platform.
In short, I found it effective to leverage an existing platform to start small.
By building a Facebook group, I was able to grow a community to 300 members over the space of 12 months.
By adding value to this group each day, I was able to speak to users and understand the problems they were facing.
After I built my product MVP, I took the time to personally DM each member and invite them into the new community.
In summary, I'd recommend building an audience as soon as possible. Whether it be an email list or a Facebook group, it'll help grow your initial user base.
If you think a similar strategy could work your product, you can catch the full case study detailing my working here: https://clickthrough.marketing/post/190819-Building-A-Community-With-Facebook-Groups
I really, really like the "adding value to this group each day" part. That, to me, is the key. Making people genuinely interested in what you have to give because they're interested in what you have said. Otherwise, you are just another faceless entity yelling into the crowd.
Thanks for the case-study! Very nice tips for people who want to optimize their Facebook presence. There are a number of things one can miss on Facebook, and you point out many!
Thanks mate, appreciate it!
Was there any strategies you found effective when acquiring your first users?
We found the communities (on Facebook and Instagram) where our potential customers would be most active, became (or were already) members of those and just jumped into conversations, as normal people. We serve online teachers, and my co-founder was an online teacher herself, so it was a natural progression. At some point, we dropped a few links to the project, and word of mouth took us to where we are now. We were always careful not to come across as someone who just wants their business. As teachers ourselves, we could be genuinely interested in helping them with their problems.
Finding the water cooler where your audience congregates is essential.
Nice work! Definitely important to focus on adding value before expecting anything in return.
I am still acquiring customers for the product I have been building https://creft.io and I have been able to get 100 presign ups in 3 days.
The product is targeted towards top professionals, so what the team did was to create a spreadsheet of the best professionals we have either worked with or know personally. This way it is easy for us to acquire users from our personal network.
You can check the product out https://creft.io and presign up if you are interested.