Do you give free access to your SaaS to friends and colleagues? Lifetime deals for free?

When searching for beta testers, you should find people that are part of your target audience and use your product regularly. If this applies to your friends and colleagues, go ahead.

If this is not the case, the feedback you receive won't have the same value. While they might provide valid criticism and point out bugs, they can also nitpick on things that your actual customers won't care much about while completely overlooking more serious issues. You can easily get sidetracked this way and spend your time on the wrong things.

This doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't give them free access. If they are not part of your target audience, they won't buy your product anyways. Just be aware that their feedback may not represent your customers and keep looking for more beta testers.

You should definitely do that, the feedback you will get will be a lot more valuable than the money. Real users usually don’t give a lot of feedback since they don’t know you and don’t care.

Yes. You'll have more friends than potential customers. If that is not the case, switch business.

if your friends are your target audience then definitely yes

I believe you should have a focused group of testers if possible, however, this group should match some or all of your target personas

I gave a bunch to friends - but I think its not useful feedback. They might give you very cosmetic feedback and can lead to dead ends...

For friends, family and colleagues I definitely do it for free just because it feels like the right thing to do, but often times those people help me beta test, every big launch I get like 20 of close people to spend like 1-3 hours finding bugs in my products so feels like a worthy trade off :)

I also give some users lifetime deals because I want them to almost be advisors to the product so I can hit them up anytime and there is that kind of relationship

However it depends on how much it costs.

I do when I can, but most of the times the products I'm building are for a target audience that rarely includes my friends.

I think putting together a tester team is a good idea BUT only if they are truly in your target market

99% of people I know in real life aren't in the target market for me so I know that if I gave them a lifetime discount they would use it for a few minutes and never touch it again.

It would be helpful for testing onboarding/catching a few bugs but probably wouldn't be great for things like making decisions on features.

That said, I am constantly giving away free discount codes but usually just for fun bc it feels cool :)

Since they already help me with suggestions and feedback (and because they're friends!), I always offer my stuff for free to them.

After launching my dev agency https://criov.com/ i started working on my SAAS and never relied on colse peoples opinion cause Usually feedback that comes from strangers is better cause they dont care about your feelings