My love-hate story with BetaList

Just like every early stage startup, we have to manage in the best possible way our two most precious resources: Time and Money.

And just like every other early stage startup, we crave market validation of our idea, even though our product is still in its infancy (in our case, in private beta) by onboarding beta testers to get feedback and fine tune our product/market fit.

The startup I’m currently working on, Ohmygeorge.com, is a financial markets game simulation for wannabe traders (i.e. falls in the consumer app category) and one of the quickest/cheapest ways to acquire an initial bunch of beta testers is by using early adopters “providers”, the most famous one being Betalist.co.

So, I was very excited at first when I submitted my startup and received the first email from them:

Ok, money is a resource we value more than time as it is now, so I decided to wait two-months for the free listing.

2 months later, we were nowhere to be found on BetaList. I was starting to get worried.. Big hopes of getting my first beta users — and first users through them, fantasizing about a hockey-stick growth. I read so much good feedback from people using their services:

Here: https://medium.com/@marinmedak/a-hardware-startup-betalist-and-product-hunt-a98960f6f6ec#.3uabu1t2c

Here:https://medium.com/@kuoll/4-reasons-you-should-go-to-betalist-first-600f99f69bfb#.4a6lczkf0

Here : https://medium.com/@kuoll/4-reasons-you-should-go-to-betalist-first-600f99f69bfb#.4a6lczkf0

Exciting for a startup right?

So I contacted their help center to have an update on the situation. I was sad to receive this email:

Email from BetaList

“We accidentally sent you an email” wuttt (can you feel the burn?)

Betalist guidelines:

I had of course read the guidelines before submitting our startup’s landing page, so I had built it from scratch using bootstrap and a custom design.

Takeaways:

1. I hope BetaList isn’t becoming too greedy and losing focus on their mission of bringing easy market validation / first real users / beta tester/ to genuine startups, and I will remember for my own startup never to deviate from the mission we chose (unless we choose a new one that is ^^)
2. It felt terribly deceptive to first get accepted, then later on to be told it was by mistake, and finally to be unfairly disqualified (ok, that’s my perception, maybe I am missing something here, but still). As a customer I am very less likely to recommend their service now. So, for my own startup, I will remember that when I screw up, it’s important to take responsibility for my mistakes and make things right for the customer. In the case of Betalist, it would have meant publishing my landing page anyway (so ok, as per their criteria, for once the quality of their selection would have been lower that one time). And I would go even further, for this kind of specific event, I would remember to communicate with the customer in a very personal manner rather than using generic emails: it makes the customer think that either the service provider doesn’t give a damn or that this kind of mistake happens regularly…

As I have never used BetaList, I’d be interested in getting more feedback on the experiences you have had with BetaList :

• Did you have to pay to get featured?
• What was the acquisition rate from the traffic coming from them?
• Did the beta testers bring some value to your testing (i.e. were they relevant)?
• When you eventually launched, did they convert into real users?

Note: our launch strategy for ohmygeorge.com is not just merely centered on BetaList, this is purely me trying to figure out the ins and outs of growth hacking. I still hope we will get listed on BetaList soon so that I can draw some interesting statistics on the leads we’ve obtained.

Feel free to check us out here (as you kinda understood, we are looking for beta testers): ohmygeorge.com