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.

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?

[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.

[priv_acy]

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.

[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."