

Ask HN: How do you recruit a few hundred closed beta testers? - kapauldo

I have a prototype that I want to test out with some users to decide whether to go any further with it.  Are there web sites to recruit a few hundred beta testers?
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RiderOfGiraffes
This isn't quite answering your question, but I think it's relevant.

I recently needed some alpha testers, so I picked a community I thought would
benefit from the final product and announced that I had an unattractive, bug-
ridden experimental version of a product I thought they'd find useful. It was
pretty much guaranteed to lose data, but if they tried it, they had a chance
to craft it into what they wanted.

The 5 who responded were absolutely invaluable. It was hard, because they told
me I was wrong in so many ways, but the second version is infinitely better.
More, I'm _still_ getting advice from that first flux of feedback. I keep
going back and re-reading it, and it's repaying me many times over.

Have you had any alpha testers from the wild? Your product stability may be at
the beta stage, but is the product service?

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ErrantX
Id agree with the above. Possibly if you can pick a community you hang out in
- if you make it a personal favour/request then your likely to get a fuller
response.

Also 100 testers is a HUGE number for a prototype - your just going to be
swamped in constant bug reports, ideas and so forth. Getting meaningful data
will be tough.

You need less than 10 serious testers for a prototype.

It's a much later stage you need those hundred; when you need to test how your
code/system/hardware/site/data _scales_

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ScottWhigham
Craigslist is a fairly common place to try to find people. You don't mention
what your target audience is therefore it is difficult for us to offer more
targeted advice.

