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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1724178

by markkat • 16 years ago

27 18 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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.

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.

bustamove• 16 years ago

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

landyman• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

andrewtbham2• 16 years ago

if u have a following on twitter...

andrewtbham2• 16 years ago

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

icey• 16 years ago

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

hariis• 16 years ago

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.

Cmccann7• 16 years ago

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... but if anyone has feedback on the "feedback section" would be great to hear from you.

rexreed3• 16 years ago

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.

boundlessdreamz• 16 years ago

It is usually an Ask HN post. see samples

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

rexreed3• 16 years ago

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!

iampims• 16 years ago

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?

bherms• 16 years ago

This is actually a really good idea. Could be very useful to startups. I'd be in if we could get it done without too much of a time commitment.

ABrandt• 16 years ago

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.

johnnytee• 16 years ago

Check out this article on using Amazon's Mechanical Turk http://harperlindsey.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/how-i-used-ama...

aresant• 16 years ago

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

rexreed3• 16 years ago

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.

goodwinb• 16 years ago

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.

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

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