Is BetaList overhyped?
Hello IndieHackers,
After 4 months of having submitted Repozix to BetaList and having completely forgotten about it, we woke, my co-founder and I, to a Twitter mention from BetaList account, saying
You're featured on BetaList! 🙌
We got excited and stretched our fingers to interact with the hoard of expected users. The day started strong with 2 scheduled demo calls and 2 sign-ups within the first hour of being featured. Our enthusiasm was through the roof, then .. nothing. The following day, we had another sign-up, then another one the day after, and that was pretty much it.
I can’t help but feel somewhat underwhelmed and ask myself, is BetaList overhyped?
Trending on Indie Hackers
I think the real answer is more complicated than a simple yes/no.
Have you heard about the law of shitty clickthoughts?
Several months ago, I analyzed all IndieHackers interviews trying to determine which acquisition channels consistently work for founders. BetaList was one of those channels.
However, as more and more people use a channel it eventually gets harder/more saturated, causing people to question whether it's "worth it", concluding that it's "overhyped", etc.
I think that's what's going on at the moment with BetaList (and ProductHunt in general).
Have you ever shared your findings of it publically?
I wonder what was your conclusion.
I think totally. After being featured on betalist I had more people offer their services to me than new users.
haha, same
Yes I beleive it is. Had a similar experience and heard similar reviews.
Thought about paying for their FastTrack option to skip the waiting period. That would have been a lousy investment.
I think that's their business model they make the wait so long that you get frustrated and pay.
There are a lot of articles explaining this
Hi there. Founder of BetaList here.
I'm biased, so I won't comment on whether the site is overhyped or not.
However, I do want to clarify that 1) we do not intentionally make people wait (we simply receive a lot of submissions), and 2) the paid option has a full money-back guarantee for anyone dissatisfied with the results.
The last thing I want is for early-stage startups to feel bad about having spent money with us.
Fortunately not many people feel the need to request such a refund, but the option is there to ensure it's never a bad investment.
That's good to know --I didn't know about the refund policy for BetaList 👍
I'm sorry if this sounded in a negative tone. I definitely know the struggle of starting a startup and running is much tougher than commenting stuff about it on forums.
The reason I said so was - I read some articles that resonated with my frustration. 0
One comment that caught my eye was "We did a check on all the signups and about 40% signups from Betapage are not real. We got some good testers but not as good as we thought."
I definitely faced this issue too, Nxxza Kxxxn, Mxxox Kxxu, and several users who had converted from betalist, never showed up to the demo.
The last thing I want is to take ill of a founder who put efforts into building something, but the more community comments I read the more inclined I was to comment that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/s1ffxr/is_betalist_overhyped/
https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/gz15ms/are_betapage_betalist_worth_paying_for_listing/
BetaPage is a different company than BetaList.
BetaPage is using a confusingly similar name to us (BetaList) and been spamming and scamming for a few years now. It's very unfortunate people are confusing us as they are tarnishing our reputation.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
Depends on what your expectations are. Websites like BetaList (or even ProductHunt) will never be enough to launch a sustainable business. It's just one of the many channels you could try to get some early exposure and potentially direct lead generation or signups.
I believe we got a few hundreds of visitors & about a dozen free trials, of which 0 eventually converted to a paid account. For me that was exactly what I expected in terms of cost per trial, so I wasn't really dissapointed.
But in general I wouldn't spend too much time on BetaList, it doesn't get much better than this.
Yeah it's really just hype. Almost all of the people that visit BetaList are people who want their prodcut promoted.
It's a common issue with such platforms. They're tailored towards people who want to list their products but other than some filler content there's not much focus on targeting users to your product. It's still better to submit your product but you shouldn't expect that much.
All about managing expectations!
Also, google recently started penalizing these listing services where the users need to pay for a backlink. Beware.
Founder of BetaList here.
You make a good point, but it doesn't apply to BetaList. Each startup we feature is manually curated by our team. It's true that some startups choose to pay for an "expedited review", but these startups still need to make it through our curation step.
Multiple times a week we decline startups we don't think are a good fit, despite them willing to pay us hundreds of $$$ to be included. If we were to include those we'd quickly lose our audience and yes then Google would eventually penalize us.
The only option to pay for a link is through our adveritsing packages but those are marked as "nofollow" and also need to be relevant to our audience (i.e. also manually curated by our team)
Thanks for providing the detail on all of this. They reach out to flowabl.io to detail all the good they can do. But its nice to know its all just hype.
Hi Tyson. Mind sharing the reach out you mentioned? Here or via email: [email protected]
We typically don't reach out to startups. It sounds like someone else might be emailing startups in our name.
@tysonlawrie @marckohlbrugge I think you might be referring to Betapage, who are notorious for their emails
Yes, sadly it is!
Same experience for my launching usepostly.com
Total traffic was 236. I was also tempted to Pay for this FastTrack option but I am mighty glad I resisted that urge!
I feel bad for people who end up paying for it 😕
For a (mostly) free service it provided some very good traction for my launch
That was the same for me, a little peek of traffic with little conversion.
However, it's always good to take a DR 70+ backlink.
I didn't expect much before listing there. I went there for the backlink.
yes, I think people use it more to try to promote their product than to browse and discover new products
Having recently launched Venture Cards, I made the mistake of contacting Betalist a couple of months ago to see about a paid listing - it seemed like an obvious match for me to offer startups a free listing on my service.
Sadly the number of emails I've had from them offering "a special deal that ends in 48 hours" is endless! And gives me a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. The comments here confirm my worries.
Hey Steve. Can you share an example of this "a special deal that ends in 48 hours" email? We don't send these kind of emails, so I'd like to investigate what's going on.
You can either post it here publicly for full transparency, or via email at [email protected]
There are a few BetaList copcats with confusingly similar names, so perhaps it's one of those.
Hi Marc, oh damn, I've just realised you are not betapage.org - they are the ones I'm less than impressed with. Forgive me, I am sorry to have confused things and mixed you up.
As for ads on your site, 'fraid those advertising prices are beyond me right now!! If there's anything else you can help with to build my free membership of startups then let me know.
No worries, that's indeed what I thought. Appreciate the follow up!
I feel like these services are just good to get some backlinks off of. I added my last product there too and it was pretty disappointing.
Totally agree
Feels like it doesn't worth the hustle huh.
The submission is not too time-consuming and you end up with a backlink, not too shabby.
Can you share how your product featured on BetaList? Our InstantLogo was featured on ProductHunt, we got 7 orders on the day, and 2 on next day too!
We simply went through their forms and waited. The forms were pretty stantard.
My product was featured before and voted 14th on the day. Is your product featured again or just once?
Here is my product, a logo maker https://www.producthunt.com/posts/instant-logo-design-2
We are not featured on PH. Kudos on Instant Logo Design, looks great.
Thanks @Cef111