Beta List → Brutal stats after 24h
We submitted Dekks to betalist.com last week and got featured yesterday. We were super excited and were expecting traffic, not crazy traffic but still some, especially after such a rapid sign off 😳
Now after 24 h we had a total number of 72 users. The bounce rate was very low and we had about 22 subscriptions to our mailing list, but to be fully honest I was expecting more.
I'm really surprised and don't know if this is normal or a total exception. Does anyone have similar experiences with betalist? Do you guys have the same stats … what happened here? Maybe my images sucked … they might have tbh, but is there anything else I was missing?
Would be great to get your thoughts on this to learn from the mistakes. Thanks ✌🏻
We run a startup directory submission service ( Listhour) and we tell all our clients not to expect much beside 15-20 good backlinks.
I think the startup directories like Betalist, Betapage, etc., have had their run but they have become quite irrelevant if you are looking for anything besides a good backlink. Most of the early adopters have shifted to Producthunt.
My suggestion is not to pay more than $30/50 for any startup directory out there. Just not worth it.
Thanks for sharing your thought. I think you are right about their relevance. I guess it's not bad to submit to these sites, it's just not a huge amount of traffic you are getting. We are super excited to launch on Product Hunt once we have the first working version up and running.
Cool, best of luck.
For PH, why not put up a landing page under the upcoming section where interested users can subscribe. It will help you build an audience.
Do you have experience with it? I think the ship plan is currently around $59 per month, is it worth it?
It is worth the money for 2-3 months. A couple of good leads ( from the subscribers) and you will get a good ROI. Here are my revenue stats which I can directly attribute to PH launch:
Jonapr: $1k
Promotehour PR plans: $4k
ProductHunt is becoming more like a product discovery tool. So having a solid presence on it is a must. We still get good no. of leads from Producthunt months after the launch. Unfortunately, we can't say the same about other startup directories.
Hi Jit, this is amazing! Thanks for sharing. I'm gonna go for PH Ship for sure, I'm already on it just not paying yet → Dekks Upcoming Page
How did you write to all the journalists? Is there a specific pattern you followed?
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You are right about the quality of the backlinks. Just that for new startups, you are starting from zero and the startup directories are the quickest way to build online presence and credibility.
My results https://www.indiehackers.com/post/results-of-betalist-7222a89674
Visitors - Versoly (366), Innercircle (200)
Demos - Versoly (132)
Sign ups - Versoly (7)
Paying customers - Versoly (0)
Interesting, thanks for sharing Volkan! From your article I get that 70 are quite usual.
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This month I was featured in a bunch of sites so i will list in order :)
PH didn't go as well as I would have expected. Traffic seems to be low this time of year.
I'm able to drive a huge amount of traffic from IH as I post often and hopefully provide value and share my experiences.
Betalist is much higher than it normally is due to driving traffic to it from IH.
Google organic is hard for us as we compete with companies with 200+ employees and years of content.
We randomly got listed on stackshare which is cool, but developers love building their websites themselves :) I need to start educating them why it's a bad idea. But I do it myself so it would be a little hypocritical.
https://saaspages.xyz/ is a great source for us, requires very little work and drives traffic consistently. We plan on working on it more to increase traffic.
Volkan man! Thanks for sharing your stats here … wicked,
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☝️Update: I just received the BetaList Digest newsletter and Dekks is featured. Apparently they have a lot of subscribers … super curios about the traffic tonight. I will post stats tomorrow morning (while I'm writing this 10 people are on it Real-Time)
☝️Update: I fixed the preview image to an animated gif. However the guys from BetaList are super responsive, they changed the image in a couple of hours.
Hi Stefan. Marc here, founder of BetaList.
Just wanted to chime in and mention that your startup was featured in our newsletter 3 hours ago. That should drive some additional traffic. To be clear this was automatic and unrelated to this post.
Startups are not* included in the newsletter until at least 24 hours after being featured. This allows us to fairly measure the popularity of each startup before we decide which ones make the cut. For example if your startup was featured an hour before the newsletter went out, it wouldn't be fair to compare you to a startup that was featured 23 hours ago and has amassed more likes, comments, clicks, etc.
Hi Marc, thanks for reaching out, really appreciated. Thx in any case for featuring it so quickly!
As I mentioned below in one of my comment … maybe our preview images sucked, which I swapped out for an animated gif. I'm just not sure what it is and why people get so many different stats. However I just checked the stats on analytics and it's now picking up more visitors through the newsletter. Let's see how it performs, so far 80 in total since the last 3 hours.
@marckohlbrugge fresh stats: 200 so far, but I reckon there is more coming today.
👍
Stats do indeed vary quite a bit from startup to startup. The name, one-sentence description (pitch) and thumbnail image are crucial to gaining traction on BetaList (or most startup discovery platforms for that matter).
Since your product name is non-descriptive it comes down to the pitch and thumbnail. The pitch doesn't really tell me what problem you solve and why you're better. I'd stay away from meaningless words such as "ultimate" and "better" (on your landing page). Tell people how it's better instead.
I'm not sure what thumbnail you had before, but current one is quite abstract. It looks nice graphically speaking, but doesn't do a great job conveying what your product is about. That doesn't have to be a problem, but combined with the rather generic pitch I think people are left somewhat confused about what the product does and move on to the next startup post.
How is Dekks better than Keynote or Powerpoint? I'd focus the pitch on that. As for the image, I'd just show off the product. Perhaps a simplified mockup instead. (one of the images is kinda like that, but a bit too abstract still I think).
Thanks for your input and great to get your thoughts on this in general. Gonna try and improve → always WIP ✌🏻
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A variety of factors, but to get the most out of getting featured I'd focus on the following two things:
That seems obvious, but you won't believe the confusing descriptions makers come up with. We do our best clarifying these (unlike e.g. Product Hunt, we manually review each post and edit if necessary), but there's only so much we can do based on the information we receive.
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Hey,
For us as well the traffic we had from betalist was super low, betapage is not worth it neither.
Just good for SEO but not sure
I had the opposite experience. Got around 250 beta sign ups from betapage
That's really good! Can you share your product page from BetaList, would be great to see how you did it.
absolutely! here you go https://betapage.co/startup/solfej
at what time did you post on the beta page?
My page was up on betapage for an entire day last week
The question is - who uses betalist to find tools and is your ideal customer there?
I wonder who services like betalist are really for. I use it to find content for my newsletter so maybe other people like me. In that case you might find you get links or mentions over the coming days.
100% agreed. Right now I'm trying to be as granular as possible … but yes you are are right in that sense. My concern wasn't about getting people to subscribe, I was more surprised how little visitors actually showed up.
Is that 72 paying users, or 72 free users, or 72 website users (aka visitors)?
Makes about 200x difference how bad this was...
Of course, I should have been explicit. 72 visitors (website users), so I reckon this is pretty bad LOL
Ouch.. I thought that would be the case, but since you called them "users" instead of "visitors" there was some room for ambiguity, and hope.
Well, thanks for sharing the numbers, and sorry to hear that you didn't become overnight billionaire :)
Too bad, expected at least a billion visits 👀
Out of curiosity, what was the process like to apply? How long did it take? What are the quality of the sign ups you received?
No signups, just visitors for the website. Signup depends … are all assets ready to go, have you written the intro and so on … signup itself takes 2 min. It took 4 days to be confirmed, but I guess we got lucky. You can jump the cue by paying 120 bucks.
Hey Stefan, interested to hear why exactly you were expecting more. What were your (higher) expectations based on?
I'm not entirely sure. I guess when you read a lot in the start up channels, then BetaList is always on the radar somehow. I expected slightly more traffic tbh, however I'm still grateful! After giving it another thought, maybe our previews weren't good enough.
It's tough. We spend more time focusing on the success stories you see around here and you can't help but get excited and hope for it yourself.
I went through a similar range of emotions on Friday with a Black Friday special on Product Hunt. Not gonna lie, I was upset. I thought I'd get more traffic and couldn't understand why other products with less upvotes were ahead of me. But at the end of the day, it didn't cost me any money, got a good backlink by being on there and a handful of new subscribers.
Every eyeball counts.
Fully man!
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