How can we make BetaList the best place to launch your product?
TL;DR – I want your feedback and suggestions. How can we make BetaList the best place to launch your product?
What are we doing well? More importantly, what are we doing poorly? What should we improve?
When I first started BetaList almost 12 years ago (😱) it was a very exciting time. It was my first succesful startup and I enjoyed working on it a lot. I got to help other startup founders and make a living doing that. It was and forever will be my "in" to the startup world.
However, as the years went by the initial excitement slowly wore off and as a result I got a bit complacement. I was more interested in pursuing new product ideas rather than improving and growing BetaList.
I'm not sure if that was the right or wrong call. I think you should follow your heart, but at the same you shouldn't squander a good opportunity.
Either way, I ended up automating most of the business and delegated whatever couldn't be automated. BetaList became a profitable "cash cow", but growth and product development stagnated.
Fast forward to 2022. I received a serious acquisition offer for BetaList at a tempting valuation. During the negotiation process I had to sell the buyer on BetaList's future. Somehow by doing that I ended up reinvigorating my excitement for the site. There's so much untapped potential that I still want to explore. So I ultimately I decided not to sell and pursue that future myself.
This brings me to today. Me and my (small) team are working on a big redesign. We have many ideas for where to take BetaList. But I'd like to hear yours.
I regularly see IH'ers share their BetaList experience here in the community. So I figured this should be the first place I go to ask for feedback.
- How can we make BetaList more valuable to you as a maker?
- How can we make the process of getting featured easier?
- What products would you like to see on BetaList?
- What info would you like to see on the startups we feature?
- What are we doing wrong?
- What are other sites like Product Hunt doing well?
- Where do you see untapped potential for BetaList?
Thank you in advance and keep shipping 🙌
Any new business that submits on Betalist wants to acquire traffic. So first of all, Betalist should aim to generate a lot of traffic on its own website. This can be achieved via great weekly newsletters, engaging content on the website, success, and failure stories, etc.
Once considerable traffic is generated for Betalist, it should help get more traffic on specific product listings. Ideally, each listing should have an email-capture form with a discount code to track the engagement.
If Betalist has a reasonably good budget, they can do dynamic re-targeting ads on FB, and Google to users who have already visited the listing page. Maybe, the listing owner can outsource that to Betalist.
This should be good to begin with.
Thanks for sharing. Those are some interesting ideas for sure!
We'll try and make the site/newsletter more engaging to increase traffic to our site and ultimately to the startups we feature.
@marckohlbrugge, as a fresh rejected submitter (#92338), my recommendation would be to start providing at least a very basic reason for the rejection. It's demotivating getting rejected after spending time to prepare the submission, fulfilling all criteria requirements, working on the project, to then see that it got rejected for unknown reasons. While other submissions that (IMHO) look worse got accepted and published.
I might have an idea about the reason that I'm to try improve and resubmit, but it's still a total guess, and wastes time on both sides (to guess, then resubmit, and for you to review it multiple times).
As someone building various side projects, that'll likely prevent me to do any other submission in the future (as I could spend the same time to prepare a Betalist submission to do it for another place instead)
I like Betalist, but maybe just as a lurker and not as a submitter :(