🧪 Where to find alpha testers?
by•
One of my young and enthusiastic maker followers recently asked me for advice on finding alpha testers.
And honestly… I realized I’m not the best person to answer this one =D
We built RunEvr inside an animation studio, so our team of artists naturally became our first alpha testers.
We had a real product, a real team, and a real workflow to test it on from day one.
So I couldn’t really give advice based on my own experience.
Instead, I offered to create a thread and ask YOU - the community:
Where do you find your alpha testers before launch?
Would love to hear what worked for you - and what definitely didn’t.
280 views
Replies
on how to actually reach them, the thing that worked for us was going where people complain about the problem in public and then contacting them one at a time, instead of posting an ask anywhere. for our first product that meant reading google reviews of the businesses we wanted, because the owner is usually the one replying to the bad ones and they sign those replies with a name. that gave us a real person plus something they had already said out loud was broken, so the first message was about their thing rather than about ours. hit rate was still bad and most of it was calls that went nowhere. but those were the only people who told us anything true. anyone who agrees to test because you asked them nicely will just tell you its fine.
RunEvr
Good strategy with the reviews! =)
And I totally agree about testers who just say everything is fine... That’s the worst thing that can happen to a maker =D
@adana the fix that worked was asking them to send me the thing they made with it, instead of telling me how it went. one person sent a screenshot with three steps in it i never designed :) that told me more than the whole call did.
RunEvr
@rabnoor_s Yes, usage scenarios can be unexpected sometimes =)
@adana everyone is giving u criteria and not the where, so, here. threads like ur own.
on ur marketing thread someone wrote out our exact product as a problem she cant solve. we didnt go looking for a tester, she described the thing first. comment sections are the only place ive found where people say the problem out loud unprompted.
RunEvr
@niveditha_patluri1Â Really? Nice! =)
It’s really cool to know that threads and comments can actually work!