Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthewking | Hacker News Reader

Open your product to beta testers, and hopefully once the beta period stops, a certain percentage of the testers will have built a reliance upon your software, and sign up to the paid account.

You can also use the testers for testimonials etc for your site. A referral fee will then help push your current customers to recommend it to their friends.

It'll be a lot easier to find people to sign up for free, then it will to sign them up immediately for a paid account.

You can then convert them later :)

View on HN

I concur on the beta tester conversion path. It's a twist on the freemium model without the negative that people expect some level of your product to always be free. Whenever you're ready to stop giving away from service, you announce the end of the beta. The freeloaders leave without a fuss, the real users pony up without complaint...because you were always up front that it wasn't always going to be free.

How did you find your first beta tester?

Find an active community website(call it X) that is related to your product and post some messages in the boards offering a free trial to X members. For instance, if your product is for investors, post some messages on Fool.com or MoneyMakersGroup. If your product is for gamers, maybe something on the IGN boards. For hackers, this site would do. For car buffs, maybe CarForums.net.

If it's a B2B offering, find a related vertical and look for forums or industry websites for that vertical. Again, offer a free trial or some kind of benefit to entice these customers to sign up and keep them satisfied while you work out the bugs.

Generally there are very active and loyal members at these sites that are very interested in new tools that would appeal to their niche community.

These sound like fine ideas. Are they how you got your first customer? How did that happen? I'm interested in hearing the story from start to end.

Yes, for a project I'm currently working on. It's targeted toward consumers in a small niche medical community. I Google'd until I found a handful of active forums for this niche. Then I posted to the most active one. I offered a free year's trial to the first beta users. I got 12 from that site. Then after a few days I repeated that process on another forum and got 8 more. I'm working out a lot of bugs but having real users is great. So far they've been active and enthusiastic with feedback. I'm not sure whether this is the right niche for my product, but am improving it a lot with their help. I haven't charged anyone yet(in fact, haven't even setup the payment system yet), and may run into difficulty when I do launch the public product since it seems consumers are very reluctant to pay for things online. But that's why it's great to have beta users from my target market who can help me get the product to a point where it's good enough to charge.

Wow, so you got your initial users by posting on-line! That's interesting. So far, I had been assuming that we would have to work through our networks of friends and/or make cold calls. Cold-calling is probably the hacker's worst nightmare, but I've been revving up: "I can learn to do ANYTHING!!"

From the point of view of a customer/beta-tester:

If your problem solves someone's need chances are they will find you. If posting a link on one or more sites frequented by your target audience doesn't generate a single beta tester you might want to re-evaluate what you're building.

For example I was a beta tester for GitHub and converted to a paying customer after the beta period. Someone must have put an announcement here about the site and since it solved my need for git hosting I immediately signed up.

For me, I get beta testers for a site I'm working on through my blog. I never advertised it (other than a link in my "Projects" page), and admit up front that it isn't even beta-quality yet. Still, I get about 10 signups a month.

Write a blog and publish the articles on social networking sites. You'll get beta signups naturally from that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com