Ask HN: How do you get beta testers?
My team is launched our beta but we're seriously short on testers... how do you get beta testers (other than through personal connections) without spending a lot on advertising or paying them? It's a DocSend alternative for recruiting.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Find ‘watering holes’ where your ideal customer is and appropriately approach the community. This could be online forums, Reddit groups, meetups.
Good luck
I have an open issue on GitHub for beta testers and then add them to a GitHub team.
How about... Paying them? Look, maintaining test case management infra, integrating with your SDLC, and dealing with your management and development group constantly trying to gaslight, ignore, ostracize, or downright abuse the testing team, ain't free. It's work. It's often ugly. It can shave years off our lives, stressing over how to get y'all outputting the best product possible, and maintaining the thickened skin required to keep at it in spite of the vitriol that tends to naturally ferment when you force people to confront the fact they make mistakes, even with no overt or implicit hostility expressed in doing so. Especially once you get complacent and think you're hot shit, then your software has first encounters with someone not involved in developing it, or who hasn't partaken of your particular kool-aid, and tells you your baby sucks. Then you want US to triage it and make it palatable for your group.
If you want actionable, good, predictably delivered feedback, and insurance in the form of comprehensive test automation; pay for it. Or yolo and accept the risk. Or... do it yourself after doing the hard work of mentally distancing yourself from the system as you built it so you can be objective. Have fun with that by the way. Nailing down that gem of a skill is not an easy task. Also, do it while on the line for doing your intended user's job. Remember, you have to be better at doing what they currently trying to do, plus some, to adopt.
Not what you wanted to hear, right? But as they say in the Wild Zero of Cyberspace: Not your army.