Hot answers tagged beta
12
A year ago launched my first product - it's a downloadable utility for the Windows platform. What I did to get beta testers is:
Found tech (and semi-tech) discussion forums.
Contact the owners of the forums telling them that you are new and looking for beta testers and ask them for permission to post something on their forums to get beta testers. In my ...
11
I might have some food for thought. Maybe not a solution exactly, but at least something to think about:
"Other tests showed that work done as a “favor” produced much better results. For example, some lawyers were asked by AARP to provide needy retirees with services at a cost of about $30. The lawyers did not accept the offer. However, when asked to offer ...
10
There are lots of factors and ways to advertise for beta testers, have you thought about the following questions:
On-page
Do you have a landing page?
Do you have the option to join the mailing list if you don't have an invite?
Does your landing page have a clear call to action?
Does your landing page have a clear explanation as to what your platform ...
8
Our start-up was just featured on http://betali.st/ and we have seen a solid influx of possible early adopters. This was kind of surprising given our relatively narrow niche (competitive gamers).
I would try submitting it to similar services (like KillerStartups or StartupBooster). Here's a non-exhaustive list: ...
7
You can get great feedback at http://news.ycombinator.com make sure to post in the "Ask" section.
Also, you can try to submit your startup to http://betali.st
You should also submit your startup to as many blogs and bloggers as possible.
6
You should not create the user accounts automatically.
First, you mention your launch page is "a couple months" old. It's common sense in the email marketing world that users forget about signing up in 4 to 6 months (sorry, but I can't find a reference for that right now). If that's the case, you should be sending a "Hey, we've launched!" newsletter with a ...
5
We use the idea of friction. We primarily measure decisions by the friction it adds or removes to the process of doing business with us. We're incessantly looking for ways to reduce friction because less friction = more business.
So the questions are fundamentally, "Does collecting payment information up front add friction to the process of doing a ...
5
There are different aspects of the feedback that you need. There are also different times that you would like to get this feedback. For each of these there are different methods that will be more or less effective.
In order to make your beta period useful you should set up the systems for getting this feedback on a regular basis.
Aspects of Feedback
The ...
5
I'm not a big fan of the press release -- it's kinda old school and the value if it is quickly being replaced by blogs. You won't get much interest from a press release.
I think your approach of emailing clients is much better. It will also be more productive and the insights you gain will be much better.
If you really want to do a press release, do one ...
4
Considering there's no information about your website, you've made this particularly hard to answer.
First, you can create a rough draft of your Terms of Service by copying and modifying from some other site similar to your own that has a public TOS.
Second, before your site can get hacked, a hacker has to:
Find your site
Decide it's worth hacking
...
4
A prototype is a semi working application, it's little more than a proof of concept.
A mockup (paper or screen) is a non working representation of the app.
Investors want to see a working something that they can get their heads around, assess both the validity of the idea and get some sort of valuation estimate on.
Ideas, in and by themselves, are ...
4
Crossing the chasm - your advices for single guy moving a product from free alpha to paid beta stage
Your 0.9 version is the beta. The 1.0 will be the first release. You don't typically charge for betas at this scale. If there will be code changes between .9 and 1.0 release a .95 that is code complete for 1.0.
It is unfortunate that you already are displaying a price of $15 as I'm assuming you did not do any market research or customer survey. You might ...
4
You can use the following services to find beta testers.
Prefinery
uTest
Centercode
For security testing, I would suggest to look at hosted services such as
iViZ
Fortify
4
How about...
5) Package what you have now into a minimum viable product and release that as soon as you can to quickly get feedback, allowing if necessary your first customers to use it for free during a trial period.
The problem being, even though you think you know EXACTLY what to build, it's VERY unlikely that it's exactly what the customer wants to pay ...
4
If you have an ad budget, even a small one, you could go to BuySellAds.com and purchase ad space on relative sites, and advertise 'now in free BETA, get your code' (or hopefully something a little catchier).
I would advise you to always be building relationships with people long before you ask something like this. I know that's advice a little late now, ...
4
This question has a lot of components, but I'll take a stab at it.
a) Recruitment for a restaurant review site beta is a little tricky. Generally speaking, there are many ways to approach recruitment. You could use sites like Betali.st and LaunchRock (I think you saw my answer on this yesterday) to build some awareness socially. You could also work on ...
4
If by launch you simply mean make it available to the general public then yes that should be ok.
But I definitely would not try and do a big launch with press / blogger attention etc while the product is in it's current state. Only attempt widespread adoption when it's working well enough that 95%+ of users that want to use your app will be able to use it. ...
4
Typically you would provide a little more direction. I don't think you could send someone a URL and then just ask them those questions. What you would normally do is give them a URL and ask them to perform a particular task.
Find a particular sweater and purchase it...
Post a comment on your favorite article...
Contact us through our website...
Then ask ...
4
You have a sign up rate of over 10%, first thing to emphasis from cold (i.e these are not people you interacted with previously) that is impressive but unfortunately probably skewed by your friends and while it might sound scary there isn't really enough visits or signups to identify any trends of patterns statistically with any sort of reliability.
It's ...
3
Sell the beta for a small charge, but encourage your users to provide feedback, so you are able to make enhancements to your software. To do this you might give 2 options for the beta buyers:
a small discount for all beta buyers, if they don't provide feedback.
a higher discount for all beta buyers, which provide feedback.
If someone buys without have ...
3
Gosselin07, there is no way to answer your question based on a post on a discussion forum... To answer, a good architect with deep knowledge of the programming language you're using would have to deep dive into your codebase.
But in general, my take is it's almost never a good idea to rewrite a codebase from scratch. Joel Spolsky wrote a classical piece on ...
3
I asked a similar question on the Programmers site, without much luck. You can, however, take a look at Joel Spolsky's Top Twelve Tips for Running a Beta Test for advice on how to actually run the beta. Also, I found this article mentioning several sites that might be useful in getting feedback for your project.
3
Key questions - is the quality there, major bugs ironed out? is it competitive with other products you'll be competing against? does it have the core set of features to deliver the solution it's intended to address? What's the worst result if you do come out of beta and launch? What do you fear?
It sounds like the product has the core functionality it needs ...
3
If the beta testers have been using the product for 6+ months they will not notice the problems a novice will face anymore (the problems someone using a trial will have). You need to bring more people in (have the beta testers invite their friends a la GMail) or open the product to the public.
Which way to go only you can decide, but since you ask the ...
3
Beta test is usually conducted on feature frozen product and main goal is finding bugs.
You should draw the line and release the product. Otherwise, you can keep beta testing and adding new features for years.
Another reason to release ASAP is that your product is SaaS, so you can release new features and (more important) fixes to all customers as soon as ...
3
If you feel you're responsive to problems / support, and still have a little way to go, perhaps you'd be better asking a couple of bloggers to trial / alpha your service so you can get a little publicity. If they're helping shape the product it's much more likely bugs and missing features will be tolerated.
Once you've a product you're all happy with, then ...
3
You might try Prefinery.com and UserTesting.com. Both have good resources for beta testing.
You'll also want to see the answers to this question: A beta user service for start-ups?
3
Generally speaking, I don't think there's a problem with what you are trying to do. This is more or less how most software beta tests work. There are a couple of different factors at play here, though.
One thing to consider is the user's expectations. If it's not completely clear to people when they download that it's just a beta version, there may be ...
3
Personally, I see it like this:
You want to get feedback from your users as soon as you possibly can. The sooner you know what you're doing right and wrong, the better.
Most users will not use software that is too buggy for their needs. Furthermore, you won't know if the software fits the needs if it is too buggy.
Bottom line is... beta is ready for the ...
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