No seriously, I know HN is probably the closest thing to this magic garden, but I was wondering if anyone else found any good resources for early exposure and feedback.
Having people try the site and give feedback on Mechanical Turk also doesn't work.
I like the suggestion of others on this thread to post to a focused subreddit. Another good idea is to find a blog through AllTop for your industry. I've found most bloggers will accept a direct ad for less than $100 a week.
What worked the best for me was good old AdSense, monitoring, and a/b testing. It is pretty easy to get a $100 coupon for new AdSense accounts and you can find out much about your site for that amount. Good luck.
(1) Fyi traffic figures indexed to highest: KillerStartups 1. FeedMyApp 0.85. NetWebApp 0.10. Cloudomatic 0.04. GreatWebApps 0.01.
Edit: I haven't tried this, just gotten to know from the emails they have sent me.
We have case studies on founders hiring people from the classifieds site http://thestartupdigest.com/2010/09/08/hiring-startup-case-s... but if anyone has feedback on the "feedback section" would be great to hear from you.
I'm not sure what their plans are (right now its basically classifieds for testers), but I'd love to see something far more robust. I envision the tester selecting an app to test, and then being redirected to the side within a stumbleUpon style navigation bar. This bar would provide tools to mark up the app, leave notes, etc etc. Clixpy style tracking would be great as well.
I'd definitely be game for working on this--it has "something people want" written all over it.
I have also seen some good feedback come from posting a link on Twitter. Usually just the people I know will actually try it out, so the feedback is honest and straightforward.
Tnx!
Never discount SlashDot as another - with any of those suggestions helps to build up credibility, plant seeds by sharing pieces of your start-up story, building excitement for a pre-launch , etc