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Is Betalist dead?

For me, betalist.com was always a great source of beta signups for my projects. Although it's not cheap to get featured, we'd usually get 300+ signups of which a number would convert into paid customers after launching the beta product, making it well worth the price.

Lately, however, I've been scrolling through Betalist and it appears that the products being posted these days are barely receiving interactions. Most only have a few likes (likely from the creators themselves).

Which makes me wonder, is Betalist still a good place to get featured? Are they still worth their price tag and generating a decent amount of signup?

Would love to hear about the experience from someone who has recently had their product featured :)

  1. 9

    Maker of BetaList here. We're definitely not dead.

    The explanation for few interactions is pretty simple actually. Most people visiting BetaList aren't logged in, as there isn't a clear incentive to do so. Startups are picked by me or my colleague and not based on user-ranking like e.g. Product Hunt or Hacker News. This means any engagement that requires sign in (likes/comments/etc) is relatively low, but people still click through to the sites and sign up if they are interested.

    The number of sign ups a startup featured on BetaList receives varies wildly like it does on all sites. There are startups on IH describing both positive and negative experiences. It really depends on the startup, landing page, and how good a match it is with our audience.

    As for whether the (optional) price tag is worth it, we have a very flexible refund policy. Basically if you don't feel like it was worth the money, we'll give you back your money. We're a bootstrapped startup ourselves so we understand every dollar counts at the early stages.

    1. 2

      Happy to hear that Marc! Makes sense, thanks :)

    2. 1

      How much traffic does a typical feature get?

  2. 9

    I don't think it's dead, and it's still a good place to post. (cc @marckohlbrugge)

    But you should supplement sites like BetaList, Indie Hackers, and Product Hunt with actually finding your real ideal customers in the channels where they regularly hang out. Unless you're serving makers, that's usually a different place.

    1. 4

      Thanks for the tag Courtland 🙌

      100% agree with you here. I've always considered BetaList a great way to get some early adopters to help you figure out the most pressing issues before launching to a wider audience. But ultimately you'll need to find a repeatable, scalable channel to find new customers.

      The BetaList audience is more diverse than you might think, so there's a decent chance you'll find at least some very relevant customers. Primarily focus on their feedback and take the rest with a grain of salt. Especially when it comes to product feedback. (Bug reports, typos, etc are of course relevant regardless of who reports them.)

    2. 1

      I remember something you wrote a while back: "Later, however, scale is important. It's not enough just to launch on Product Hunt or Hacker News, because you can usually only do that once. You need to put some thought into scalable, long-term, repeatable channels." The same issue exists with Betalist. So I decided to work on a platform where makers can share their projects and which allows for repeatable long term growth: https://stimufy.com Would welcome any feedback ^^

  3. 4

    I still receive visits from betalist.com for my remotelist project which I launched almost 2 years ago.

    I think more than 20% of the recent sign-ups are coming from there. So it could be a matter of market or even keywords.

  4. 3

    We've been featured for free and even was in the Trending section for a couple of days (for free too).
    We had a huge number of visitors, and, as a consequence, a lot of new stars for our Github repo.
    So, it's still a good place to post your startup here.
    Another question is how good is your startup? ;-)

  5. 2

    I never really understood BetaList. I've never seen the products on there get many comments or upvotes, and the products themselves seem kind of low quality compared to the products that are featured on Product Hunt.

    I've also submitted a few products on BetaList that were not selected to be featured, even though they were featured with lots of upvotes on Product Hunt. They don't actually tell you why you were not selected, so their selection criteria seems pretty opaque.

    I know BetaList is pretty well-known, but I'm always wary of sites that tell you to pay money in order to have your product featured on the site - it creates perverse incentives for the website to feature products that may not be so great just so they can collect the money.

  6. 2

    I'm working on a similar project, but a little bit more modern and a different take. Mind if I contact you to ask you a couple of questions?

  7. 1

    We've launched several products on Betalist. Including the most recent SleekInvoice.com (https://www.SleekInvoice.com). What we've noticed is that the first week brings in a lot of traffic.

    However, it slows down drastically after that.
    Is it worth the money?
    For a startup with no exposure, spend the $399 and select a Tuesday (Between 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM EST) to launch your site on Betalist. You will get a high ROI.

    So year Betalist .com and producthunt are definitely the goto platforms for early stage startup exposure.

  8. 1

    Yeah. Not so active.

  9. 1

    I wouldn't say it's dead necessarily.

    If you play the marketing role for a startup, any featured listing is good.

    I would say that if it doesn't take a lot of your time and effort, go for it.

    No company can promise you X signups.
    It really depends on what are you selling, to whom are you selling it, how are you selling it and for what price are you selling it.

    There is only one way to find out: give it a try and see if it works for your startup.

  10. 0

    I agree that the number of real sign ups went down recently.

  11. 0

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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