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Comment by chunkyslink | Hacker News Reader

Without knowing what it is you do ...

A cost effective way of getting users (I'm guessing this is ultimately what you want) at the same time as getting decent feedback is to use a crowdsourcing solution to get educated / computer using people to review your site. Ask them to sign up and use the product and go through a number of steps. Pay a thousand people to do this. If you have a good product they will keep using it.

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"Pay a thousand people to do this."

Whaa....t? You'd need a lot of money!

Compare this to PPC campaigns and you might be surprised at how low the user acquisition cost actually is.

On average how much would you pay for a person? $5 or $10, what would be your offer to a person? Just want your honest opinion, because it sounds logical but how are you going to track 1000 people if they are going to buy your product or not? What if they take the money, signup, and leave???

The cost is very low through services like Mechanical Turk. Typically you'd ask them to complete a survey on usability of your site -- you get some useful feedback from them, and sometimes they return as users themselves.

But do you get paying users from a site like that? If I'm anonymously filling out surveys for $4 per hour I'm probably not in the target audience for your $10 per month SaaS service or a particularly prolific purchaser via affiliate links.

Does anyone have any actual success stories in that area?

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