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Ask HN: Where to get feedback for your start-up/beta/demo?

7 points by octix ↗ HN
Hello,

Can anyone share please any thoughts on how and where to get quality feedback? (free or not expensive)

Why? Recently we, a team of 2 people, reached beta milestone, but not sure where to go next. We can't get enough feedback from users or right users.

So far we have emailed a few bloggers and tech people relevant to the area, but didn't get anything yet, although that was during weekend. So, do I send 100 emails or 5?

Thank you in advance.

11 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 43.8 ms ] thread
jlemoine
I guess it's depend of the kind of product you develop.

In our case, we got about 50 different feedback during our beta (We develop a search engine for app creator):

- 60% from people we have met during meetups/conferences/contests and accelerator programs

- 30% from people in our network, we just asked them what they think of our product.

- 10% from ads. We have spend around $600 in AdWords + $150 of sponsored tweet. I would not recommend this approach since it is very expensive for the income.

octix
It turned out to be a bit more developer oriented service(it's based on Selenium).

When you say network, you mean friends and buddies?

jlemoine
Our product is also clearly developer oriented (it's a SDK). Yes I mean friends, ex-colleges but also interesting people we have reached via an introduction.
Jeremy1026
Post on Craigslist that you are looking for someone who enjoys a free coffee and X. (With X being the genre of your product.) Take the replies and explain to them what you are doing, that you are looking for some market feedback and that in exchange for 30 minutes of their time, you'll buy them a coffee at <INSERT LOCAL COFFEE SHOP HERE> while you discuss their reaction.
ZenoArrow
Isn't this what 'Show HN' is for?
octix
Done that, got a few, which helped, but we hoped for more. I guess 'new' feed gets updated too quickly...
ibudiallo
Well for my case i simply asked the good people of hackernews to review it for me. I couldn't hope for anything better:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5353348

octix
I'll read later those comments, was it helpful at all? Or it's too early to tell?

Thank you, I may try that.

ibudiallo
My changes are not live yet, but the advices make alot of sense. Sometimes we get caught up on some ideas and drift away from our main goal. I can say for sure that the feedback i got is bringing me back on the right path. I will post back the changes i made and whether it made a difference or not.
thsiao
depending on your product, you could get it from different sites like

usertesting.com fivesecondtest.com