At meetro, we created a small community of ‘beta testers’, about 40 users. These were a combination of users that were with us from the beginning, to new users that really loved our product, to friends willing to provide us with frequent feedback. What did we do to create a community of beta testers at meetro?
- Maintained a list of users that were part of this community and useful specs on the hardware and OS they were running
- Sent out private newsletters just to ‘beta testers’ letting them know they were a special group we valued deeply and give them frequent updates on what we were currently working.
- Gave them early versions of our software days to weeks before the rest of our users saw it. (On a website, this could just be access to a ‘test’ or ‘development’ server.
- With each private release we highlighted bugs we fixed, features we added, and specific parts of the software that could use their rigorous testing.
- Kept an incredibly open line of communication with them, from personal emails to hours of IM chats walking through bugs and issues that came up
Each of these were valuable in the process, and there are even more things you can even do to build community and encourage your beta testers
- Give them access to a bug tracker (like trac)
- Create a forum for them so they can share questions and experiences
- Give badges or props to the beta testers to other users on your product
