The other day, somebody asked me “Where’s a good place to hire beta testers for a new website?” My answer: If you already have a few hundred users on your site, then you’ve already have found them (and they’ll work for free.)
I think the best people to ‘test’ your product and provide feedback are your most passionate users. The users you can reward by giving private access to upcoming feature releases. There are a few reasons for this:
- Testing – Passionate users will *throughly* test your product. You won’t believe how much they will navigate around a website or software looking to explore and find new features. You don’t even have to create test plans – they’ll naturally do that for you.
- Rewards – By granting a few ‘passionate’ users secret access to new features, you’re ultimately rewarding them by saying they are most important to you and you’ll spend time with them and listen to their feedback. They will be proud to have this ‘elite’ beta status – give them a badge (if they have profiles), so they can show it off to other users.
- Quality Assurance – if you’re a startup running a consumer web app, your users will be very forgiving, provided that you have an open line of communication. For beta testers, this should include personal emails, newsletters, a private blog or forum, and maybe even giving out your IM handle. For everybody else, this just means that you have a place for news on your site – blog or forum – that you can clearly communicate you’re fixing bugs as you find them, what was recently fixed, and a process for users to submit new bugs.
Our next post will follow-up on an anecdote on how we used these practices at meetro.
