Need advice on getting first beta-users
Dear fellow hackers, 🙂
A week or so ago, I’ve asked for feedback on my first service that I recently launched. Since then, I began looking around for way to get my first beta-users.
A couple of ways that I thought of to approach finding users are these:
-
Find online blogger communities → Find relevant conversations → Participate & mention my service.
-
Find blogging platforms → Check their solutions → Find relevant conversations → Participate & mention my service.
I have exploited (1.) to some extent by participating in relevant conversations on Quora and Reddit, but haven’t got yet any result whatsoever in terms of getting anyone to sign up.
Now I plan to continue on (1.) and (2.) but I was curious if you have any candid feedback or advice regarding this effort of mine.
Cheers! 👋
UPDATE: As commenters have mentioned, I forgot to include the service link, so, for completion, here it is: https://FeedSubscription.com.
What is your service exactly? I tried to look for it on your IH profile but couldn't find it.
I feel like product hunt is a great place to network with tech and product enthusiasts who are always down to beta-test things.
You can tweet in #buildinpublic and people might be down to help out! (fellow founders)
Posting on Indie Hackers can work ;) just gotta include the actual link and value proposition so people know what they're signing up for!
While it takes some work, when done right, even some simple YouTube videos and walkthrough tutorials go a long, long way. First off your beta testers will want videos anyways, but YouTube is great for SEO and getting on top of related keywords. I've seen many of my beta users come from YouTube - people watch YouTube and then often start talking about your product in forums. You can monitor this by using backlinking checkers for your website then go directly to those forums and try to identify similar ones.
There's also this great resource: https://github.com/mmccaff/PlacesToPostYourStartup#readme
All the subreddits for posting your startup :))
Hope this helps!
Maybe it’s just my fear, but I kind of resist going “too” public with this service because I think it may be a little too raw to post on Product Hunt. 🤔
Thank you for the tip about videos. Makes sense.
And yes, thank you for the GitHub link too. 😇
Thanks so much for the github link will look through it when possible. I found that PPC works great for when starting out, not to build a profitable marketing channel, but to drive traffic and see if people understand your product, if they're willing to provide email or extra info. It could cost around $0.50 - $1 a user, so it can get expensive, but if you're storing all the user activity data and using things like hotjar IMO its money well spent when starting out
Here is my reasoning chain:
Your ideal customer has a blog but no subscriber management system.
Mostly these would be personal / company blogs / bear blog. Since most hosted blog services provide email subscriptions out of the box.
So out of the personal / company blogs / bear blog who has the most need to have their blogs read. Most companies do the blog thing because of SEO not because they want their blogs read.
That leaves personal / bear blog.
Personal blogs are hard to find.
That leaves bear blog. https://bearblog.dev/ They have RSS. They also have a nice discover page. https://bearblog.dev/discover/
Now I would simply "pivot" your business to be email for bear blog and reach out to individual bear blogs and see if they need it.
At any point if I am missing something do let me know. I am not an expert in this space but hope it helps. 😃
Thank you for sharing your reasoning chain, it make good sense. 🤔
Didn’t know hear about Bear Blogs before, thank you for sharing, they seem to have a refined simplicity to them. 🤓
Not sure what is RES first of all. I wrote some pointers about the ecosystem around building products in Zero To Founder but if you can give more context on RES probably I can give some thoughts.
RES is the “code name” of the project that I use internally, sorry for bad editing. 🙃
Thank you for the comment, and also for the link to “Zero To Founder” — it looks quite solid from the description. 😎
I'm looking for Beta tester as well, for me Reddit is working well.
You don't have to spam, just look for conversation where people ask for the products/service you offer and mention it there.
Here's my flow:
Nice hints, thank you! 🙏