BetaList vs. reddit vs. Hacker News
Adventures in finding our first users
TL;DR
- Betalist is awesome for a few days of high-conversion-traffic and require low investment on your part // They’re super-nice too.
- Reddit and Hacker News are a terrific resource for traffic and feedback, and they are parallel, not alternative, to BetaList. Also, they have the potential of building a community and provide the kind of stage that allows you to convey your ideas in length and interact with your users before they are your users :)
So, you’ve finished your MVP
Now you need users. But you don’t know sh*t about marketing. Maybe you even find the word itself gives you the chills.
As a developer, I tend to feel a little sleazy when I nee d to get into “marketing”. Like a salesman trying to push someone to buy something they don’t need. But I do believe we have a good product that brings value. I know this because we have happy users that are getting value from dumpstr every day. Not only that, but we at dumpstr are using it ourselves, and it’s bringing us value every day. I really feel that if more people hear about dumpstr, they’ll be happy using it.
Also for us, having our comfort zone around coding, marketing seems like such a grey area. You just fiddle around hoping to get results, and when you do, you don’t know what worked and what didn’t.
“How to get users for my startup”
Try googling that why don’tcha. Among the million answers, sites, blog posts and lists, we eventually found these recurring venues come up: reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt and BetaList.
Following is our comparison based on our experience trying to get initial users for dumpstr. We don’t have all the data we could have, but after testing things for about 30 days, we got a sense of what worked more, and what was worth our time.
Apples and Oranges (in more ways than one)
But first, a disclaimer: how can you even compare these? They have different purposes, different user base, different volumes and moderation.
Also, this all depends on our one specific product: dumpstr, and how appealing the specific landing page we built was to the users going in.
Not only that, an early product’s change rate is so fast that you will be testing different things every time. Your tagline changes, your landing page changes, even your product changes.
Having said that, it’s still worthwhile to make a comparison, because in the end it all goes toward the same goal — getting users.
On to the comparison!
Hacker News
Hacker news is a community operated by y-combinator. Very similar to reddit, but focused on news “hackers” would find interesting.
One of the sub forums there is “Show HN” which is where you’re supposed to post your new startup.
HN — The Good:
- High traffic — if you made it to the front page, you can expect a lot of hits.
HN — The Bad:
- Your post will probably be buried pretty quickly.
Here there are a few subreddits worth mentioning. We tried /r/startups, /r/programming, /r/web_design, /r/webdev.
Reddit — The Good
- High traffic — even more than hacker news according to some.
- You also get feedback now and then, although not a lot.
Reddit — The Bad
- You have to spend time building karma before you can post anything.
- The moderators are pretty aggressive about removing posts (this can be understood, you have to protect from spam).
- In some subreddits they have a special “share your startup” pinned post. If you post outside it, the moderators will probably remove your post. These pinned posts operate in a comments fashion (rather than posts). Just to say, in most cases with these kind of posts we had little success due to a huge pile of comments there.
BetaList
Let’s talk business.
Betalist — The Good
- Little energy spent on submission.
- You don’t get drowned in a constantly changing feed, you get a fair chance.
- Your post stays up means that users keep viewing your product for a few days.
- The conversion is super high. Up until now, out of 300 visitors, 95 people signed up! That’s over 30%! Must mean something about the quality of the community, these are really people that are looking to try out new products.
BetaList — The Bad
- It takes a month to get featured (unless you pay for fast review).
Summing Up — BetaList, The Best-o’-list ^^
Posting to online communities asking for feedback, hustling for karma, getting posts removed by moderators and pushing for upvotes from friends and family takes a lot of time and energy.
In our phase, small, bootstrapped, with no press releases and publicity stunts, BetaList gave (and is still giving) the most consistent flow of engaged and interested users.
Comparing the time and energy spent to the number of actual quality sign ups, BetaList was the #1 source of sign ups with the least time investment required.
We’ll keep you posted!
