

Ask HN: Comparing beta sign-ups to paying customers - wolfrom

We are currently working on the MVP for our startup.  We do hope eventually to include premium features specifically for business and content producers, but our MVP will be a consumer-focused free service.<p>There are many strong articles detailing how we should find ten people who will say that they'll buy the product.  (Good example: http://blog.asmartbear.com/customer-validation.html)  Does anyone have advice on how many beta sign-ups could serve as a reasonable gauge in lieu of customer validation?
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binomial
Have to agree with fezzi's post here. Try to find a way to talk to customers.
You should be talking to them anyways to get their feedback on the idea behind
your product.

If you must use beta users as a metric, be very conservative and realize that
most of those signed up will probably not even use the beta, let alone buy the
product (this varies by industry and product of course, among many other
factors). In your case, you might think 1 in 100 signups will become
customers, or 1 in 1000, or 1 in 10. Since we don't know what the
product/market/marketing methods etc are, you're the best one to make the
guess.

But yeah, you should talk to real potential customers.

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damoncali
Depending on the complexity of the product, it's sometimes easier, cheaper,
and more reliable to just build it and try to sell it than it is to do all the
customer development mumbo-jumbo. If you've got a beta, why not try to sell
it?

For a more direct answer, I've seen a lot of anecdotes (and this fits my
experience as well) that a successful consumerish freemium web app gets about
1-2% free to paid conversion. Those numbers would be lower for beta to paid
because of tire kickers.

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fezzl
I don't think a Beta sign-up should count as customer validation, no matter
how many you get. Curiosity != willingness to pay for your product at your
price point. Frequent usage of your product might come close, but it is still
no substitute for actual, explicit statement by the customer that he would
"buy this product a $X."

