

Ask HN: Any good places to find early adopters/testers in addition to HN? - markkat

I'm simply looking for that magical garden where there are slews of open-minded folk that are excited to play with your MVP and willing to offer helpful feedback.<p>No seriously, I know HN is probably the closest thing to this magic garden, but I was wondering if anyone else found any good resources for early exposure and feedback.
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goodwinb
In testing a MVP I submitted to several of the startup websites (1). The
quality of traffic was bad. Their audience were people who were interested in
kicking the tires on startups and not people in the industry I was targeting
who needed a solution.

Having people try the site and give feedback on Mechanical Turk also doesn't
work.

I like the suggestion of others on this thread to post to a focused subreddit.
Another good idea is to find a blog through AllTop for your industry. I've
found most bloggers will accept a direct ad for less than $100 a week.

What worked the best for me was good old AdSense, monitoring, and a/b testing.
It is pretty easy to get a $100 coupon for new AdSense accounts and you can
find out much about your site for that amount. Good luck.

(1) Fyi traffic figures indexed to highest: KillerStartups 1. FeedMyApp 0.85.
NetWebApp 0.10. Cloudomatic 0.04. GreatWebApps 0.01.

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icey
I don't know how on-topic it is over there, but you might want to try
<http://techstartu.ps> and also perhaps <http://startups.reddit.com>

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hariis
You can post at Startup Digest <http://thestartupdigest.com/classifieds/>

Edit: I haven't tried this, just gotten to know from the emails they have sent
me.

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Cmccann7
You can post for free, no harm in trying.

We have case studies on founders hiring people from the classifieds site
[http://thestartupdigest.com/2010/09/08/hiring-startup-
case-s...](http://thestartupdigest.com/2010/09/08/hiring-startup-case-study-
yackr/) but if anyone has feedback on the "feedback section" would be great to
hear from you.

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iampims
That could be an idea for a webapp. Anybody who volunteers for beta-testing
MVP, receives a notification when a new project matches at least of of his
criteria. Feedback would be integrated as well. Who's in for this?

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ABrandt
Here's a post from 2 months ago for an MVP that aims to do just that -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511591>

I'm not sure what their plans are (right now its basically classifieds for
testers), but I'd love to see something far more robust. I envision the tester
selecting an app to test, and then being redirected to the side within a
stumbleUpon style navigation bar. This bar would provide tools to mark up the
app, leave notes, etc etc. Clixpy style tracking would be great as well.

I'd definitely be game for working on this--it has "something people want"
written all over it.

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landyman
You can try reddit -- not the main reddit, but a technical subreddit will
usually get you some constructive feedback. For example, if I wrote an app in
Python, I could post to the python subreddit to get some better feedback than
any of the other ones. You'll have to weed out some of the trolls, but it's
still worth the time.

I have also seen some good feedback come from posting a link on Twitter.
Usually just the people I know will actually try it out, so the feedback is
honest and straightforward.

~~~
markkat
Yes. This is pretty much where I am at. :)

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johnnytee
Check out this article on using Amazon's Mechanical Turk
[http://harperlindsey.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/how-i-used-
ama...](http://harperlindsey.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/how-i-used-amazons-
mechanical-turk-to-validate-my-startup-idea/)

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rexreed
ok - sorry if this is a stupid newbie question and an RTFM issue in a FAQ
somewhere, but what is the proper procedure for posting something to HN to get
feedback on a new app from HN readers? This is probably not even the right
thread to post this, so feel free to flame...but seemed relevant.

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boundlessdreamz
It is usually an Ask HN post. see samples

[http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site:news.ycombinator.com+test+my#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+ask+hn+my+app&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=3c6a194fccb80a58)

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rexreed
Great! I just posted it using submit. I did notice that it appears in the New
section, but not in the Ask section -- again, sorry for my newbie-ness, but
how do you get your submitted post to appear in "Ask"? I used the Ask HN:
prefix.

Tnx!

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aresant
Depends on the app but I've had luck with SitePoint.com, DigitalPoint.com
forums - lots of entrepreneurs, techies roll there.

Never discount SlashDot as another - with any of those suggestions helps to
build up credibility, plant seeds by sharing pieces of your start-up story,
building excitement for a pre-launch , etc

~~~
rexreed
I've had trouble with Sitepoint as they instantly ban you if you post anything
that remotely looks like spam. Many forums are the same way - what's the right
approach to posting onto a forum? Do you have a good example of what's
accepted? I got the ban-hammer pretty quick on Sitepoint for what I thought
was a pretty innocent post asking for feedback on an MVP.

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andrewtbham
if u have a following on twitter...

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andrewtbham
for an mvp it may be tough... but i have beta tested for companies that i
follow on twitter.

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bustamove
ditto. If anybody is aware of any, please advise.

