Betalist is worth $129

Hi all,

For those that aren't familiar with betalist, it's a site that features early stage startups allowing them to attract beta testers and early adopters. You submit your product/site via an easy to use form along with some images/GIFs. Betalist reviews and later publishes the post to their site if their selection criteria are met.

Review and publication can take several weeks, but Betalist offers an expedited review for $129 (there's also a $299 option with some added goodies). We opted for the expedited review and were happy with the results. We were featured on December 19th-20th and even briefly made it into their "trending" section.

https://betalist.com/startups/trickle

Although we'd been in "public beta" for a few months, Betalist was really our first foray into actively generating traffic to the site. Being featured on Betalist made our step out into the public feel much more official and that has some value in itself.

We saw an immediate increase in traffic when we hit the betalist frontpage. Not huge, but significant (for us). We were getting around a hundred visitors a day via organic google search (content marketing), but visitors jumped to over 200 per day over the next three days. Many were identifiable as referrals from betalist, but traffic also comes from Twitter and their newsletter.

The thing we liked most about betalist was that users clearly were spending more time on our site than those arriving from google search and many were signing up. We also got an unexpected review on this site:

https://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/21/webware/online-learning-website-learn-at-own-pace-with-revisions.html

The review has continued to drive traffic even longer than betalist did. And signups remained strong. We now have several people signing up every day, whereas it was just a few times a week before betalist.

It's hard to say how much of the activity is attributable directly to betalist, we made some noise on social media ourselves which helped the betalist campaign and probably drove some traffic. Betalist also led to us getting picked up by some other sites. But I'd say if it weren't for the betalist activity we'd probably have 200 fewer signups at this stage. In this phase of development it's so important to have users trying things out. For us the $129 were definitely worth it.

I've considered some of the other directory-type sites out there like Betapage.co, Launchingnext.com. But I've hesitated to go with their paid options, because I'm not convinced they'll drive as much traffic as betalist. I would love to hear about anyone's experience with these.