
Where To Find Your First 2,000 Beta Signups - efounders
http://blog.frontapp.com/saas-where-to-find-your-first-2000-beta-signups/
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onion2k
A little while ago someone on here posted about their "$9 startup", and how
they've grown a huge mailing list of signups without writing any code. I think
you're falling in to a similar trap they had: confusing signups with users and
potential customers.

The number of people who sign up from places like friends of friends,
Betali.st, etc is vanity. It doesn't actually count for anything unless you
can turn them in to paying users, which is incredibly unlikely given that
they're a completely random bunch of "people interested in startups". It's the
difference between being interested in your product and being interested in
solving the pain that your product solves. People pay for the latter. People
just cost you money if they're the former, albeit not much.

The two metrics that really matter are how many people _use_ your application
and how many people _pay_ for your application. You could get a million
signups and still fail.

Sorry if this sounds harsh. I learnt this particular lesson the hard way. My
advice: work out who your potential users are, who decides to buy the products
they use, and market directly to them. Ignore everything else.

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steerj92
Good story, but I think you are forgetting that they are just after Beta users
to test their product and find flaws and bugs. They will most likely finish
Beta and then focus on growing their user-base with people who are likely to
pay for their product.

Beta testers don't necessarily have to be the customers who are going to stay
with you forever.

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AznHisoka
but those are the worst beta testers. Because they'll give you useless
feedback like "that color looks ugly", or "you need to make that font anti-
aliased" rather than "I wish I could export this data to Excel so I can run
calculations from it" or "I wish this could integrate with Mailchimp and
generate email reports to show to my boss".

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vlokshin
I would love to read a follow-up of sign-up numbers after you've been sitting
on the top of HN for today :)

We've had some really good luck with HN for sign-ups in the past, and if
you're being transparent about it, I'd love to hear how the numbers turn out
for you.

~~~
steerj92
I agree, an update to their blog post with HN numbers would be cool

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orliesaurus
Good breakdown, what about socialmedia referrals? Surely people that have
tried the app have also tweeted about it, do you have any insights of how many
tweets have been mentioning your product over the past few months?

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efounders
good question. We actually didn't have sharing buttons on our home + the fact
that we had a really really minimalistic homepage for a long time limited the
"viral" leverage.

That said for our public beta it'll be a focus.

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sparkzilla
Note: Betalist only features products that are in private beta and not out in
public beta.

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camus2
Where? Growth Hacking lol.

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Sindrome
Vanity Metric

