How to get the first 100 beta signups for your startup with zero marketing budget
Congratulations! Now you have a ready product and need to get early beta users to try it and give a feedback. It’s a big enough challenge for almost every first-time entrepreneur. Thank God, today we have all the available resources to figure this out and successfully launch the beta.
We are going to launch the beta version of our product this month, so this guide is also based on what we are doing now and what we’ll do after the beta is launched.
Let’s say you have identified a problem and you have a ready product which solves it. This assumes that you have already conducted a market research, did early stage customer interviews and understood the market needs, polished your product idea and developed the first version of your solution which fits with the potential customers’ needs.
So what’s next? How you actually get the first 10, 100 or 500 (beta) users for your product? And I mean how you do it fast?
Here is a list of simple but important actions to take for getting the first 100 or more users for your beta product.
- Create a decent looking landing page with all the necessary information about your product and a simple sign up form. You can use Unbounce, LaunchRock or any other similar service for this. (Note that some startup directories, like BetaList, will only accept custom designed landing pages.)
- Submit your startup to as many directories as possible. There are hundreds of directories to list and promote web or mobile apps, SaaS or cloud services and so on. You can find the full list here.
- Submit your startup to BetaList. This usually helps to get the first 50 to 100 beta users for your product. Of course, it depends on your product itself and the effectiveness of your landing page as well, but usually you get around 500–1000 page views and around 50–100 sign-ups. It’s free to get listed there, but it takes 1–2 months to happen, as they are getting too many submissions. But there is a paid option to expedite your review in case you are in a hurry. Make sure that your landing page doesn’t look generic; it should have a custom design to be accepted.
- Submit your startup to Betabound — a community of over 100,000 beta testers from around the world. Any company looking for beta testers can announce their beta test on Betabound for free.
- Use your network to get the interest of your target audience. Reach out to them, ask to try your product and share their feedback with you. If you are in tech, most early adopters are easily accessible and ready to try new products first. In the case of inapptics our target users are iOS mobile app developers and UI/UX designers, since our product helps them to visually monitor and analyse their app performance using heat maps, user flows and crash recordings.
- Now let’s see where do you find potential users from your target audience. Usually you find those people in the places they often appear — be it online (specific websites, blogs or social media) or offline (events, meetups, conferences). For example, it’s easy to find first 10–15 beta users if you post in relevant Facebook or LinkedIn groups. We got our first 10 beta users just in 20 minutes after posting in 2 groups.
- My past experience has proved that Quora is a great channel to drive targeted and, which is more important, high converting traffic to product’s landing page. Find the questions related to the problem your product is solving and share your answer with the people by mentioning your product (don’t do self-promotion and don’t copy-paste text, try to provide a useful and unique answer to each question).
- Check your competitors on Twitter to see who follows them, then build your audience by following and engaging with those people. Use FollowerWonk.com to download up to 50,000 followers who follow your competitors or related product. Start tweeting about your beta launch and share invite links with your followers.
- Now, when you have all the necessary channels in place, collect the email addresses of the potential users who sign up on your website and follow up with them. Usually, it’s fine to ask for a weekly feedback from the beta users. Interview them, collect all the feedback and improve your product based on that.
Of course, some of these steps may be irrelevant for your product, but in general, this will help you to get the first 100 or more beta users.
In one of my next posts I’ll write about what to do next after the beta is launched and how to prepare for the public launch of your product.
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Digital marketer, startup founder, entrepreneur. Director of Marketing at TruePublic.
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