Ask HN: How do you find critical thinkers/beta testers for your SAAS/Product? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you find critical thinkers/beta testers for your SAAS/Product?

11 pointsWildGreenLeave4 comments

tl;dr looking for a way to find critical thinkers/beta testers for my SAAS.

Hi everyone!

The last few weeks I have been developing my own Software as a Service product* hoping to launch soon, however now that I'm coming closer to the first beta release of the software I have no idea what to do next. Obviously marketing should be the first step, if the product is ready to be released. But its not. Instead of that I'm looking for a way to find beta tester and/or people that want to do some critical thinking of the product. Free or paid doesn't matter much, since after all the product should be profitable.

Personally I don't think ProductHunt is the way to go since the product isn't finished. Neither is Hacker News because it would quickly turn into a 'rate my saas' spam I'm afraid. Reddit may be an option. but as far as I know there isn't a sub reddit dedicated to this. The final resort would be actual advertising, but there is no guarantee people would give their feedback.

* I'll put this at the bottom since I don't want to disguise this post as an advertisement, I genuinely want the best way to find other people. But here it is: https://servitor.pw Once again it is rough on the edges and still requires a lot of work.

Edit: I'd like to apologize for any grammer or spelling mistakes, English isn't my native language.

Reach out to your network/friends, find someone in your target market that can be an early adopter.

If you don't have anyone in your close network you can start reaching out by email to distant connections you might have or try to connect with someone who writes articles, has a podcast that you are a fan of that would be a good fit.

If you approach people the right way it's easy to get connected with 'internet famous' developers.

What stack/framework are you using? Get involved in that community right away. Write articles, go to meet ups. Contribute to the framework. Become part of the community. You'll be able to meet potential early adopters and get to know the community where lots of potential future signups could come from.

Have your early adopters use it and report back with feedback/suggestions.

You can also setup monitoring for when they login, when they get alerts to see how much they are using it, how much value it is providing for them.

Good luck with your SaaS.

Who are your target customers? How many of them have you contacted? Whatever the answer, find more of them! And show them your product and ask them to pay you some money in advance to get a lifetime discount. If none bite, find out why.

Betalist.com, betapage.co, and getworm.com

Betalist takes time approx. 2-3 months, so you should submit your product right now so that when you are done polishing it more, your product will be live there.

And, if you get enough upvotes on betalist, you will have good amount of sign ups for your platform.

After that you need to engage with them to get the maximum feedback for your platform.

Post your product anywhere with a comments section. People love to complain and you will get more (negative) feedback than you can handle.

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