I got tired of searching for beta testers, so I built EarlyCrew
Every time I launched a product, I hit the same wall.
Building was the easy part.
Finding people who would actually try it and give honest feedback was much harder.
I found myself jumping between X, Reddit, Discord, and Slack communities, hoping someone would test my product. Sometimes it worked, but most of the time it didn't.
So I started building EarlyCrew.
The idea is simple:
Founders can showcase their products.
Early adopters can discover and test new startups.
Founders receive honest, actionable feedback before launch.
I'm still in the early stages, and there's a lot to improve.
I'd love feedback from the Indie Hackers community:
Would you use something like this?
What's your biggest challenge when looking for beta users?
What's one feature that would make this genuinely useful?
I'd appreciate any honest feedback—positive or critical.
I like that you're focusing on the part of validation that's usually the hardest.
Building isn't what slows most founders down anymore. It's finding the right people who will give thoughtful feedback instead of polite encouragement. If EarlyCrew consistently improves the quality of early validation—not just the quantity of testers—that's a much stronger reason to use it.
That's exactly what I'm aiming for. I don't want EarlyCrew to become another directory where founders collect signups. The goal is to help founders get thoughtful, actionable feedback from people who genuinely fit their target audience. That's the challenge I'm focused on solving, and I'm still iterating on how to make those matches higher quality.
Glad it resonated.
Your reply made me think there's one strategic decision sitting underneath that matching approach which becomes much more significant as EarlyCrew grows, but I don't think I can explain the reasoning properly in a thread without oversimplifying it.
If you're interested, what's the best email to reach you on?