How I got a few quality early adopters for my product’s alpha launch

So you’ve worked for a while and now have an early stage MVP ready. It’s time to get feedback from real users! There are many options to do that, starting with paid campaigns, posting your product on social networks/product aggregators or publishing interesting blog posts to get traction. I was interested in getting a low number of very targeted users to evaluate my product, users who fit the exact pain point that I was trying to solve, and I did that by targeting specific people on reddit. Following are the actions I took to get 20 people to provide feedback with only 1 hour worth of work.

Search for relevant reddit threads

Start by finding threads which discuss the pain point you are trying to solve. You have two options for doing that:

1. The reddit built in search bar.
2. Using Google. From my experiments this yields better results so I use this method. Goto Google and prefix your search term with site:reddit.com. This will return results which are only from reddit. My startup deals with career and high-tech employment, so one of the search terms I used is:

Message relevant people with a clear ask

Pick the first result (which should lead to a reddit thread) and read through it, making sure it is indeed relevant. If it isn’t, move to the next result. Now things get interesting — pick people who submitted a relevant topic or commented on one, and send them a personal message explaining who you are, and what you ask them for. I tried a few versions of messages, and this is the one which had the best results for me:

Follow-up with the ones who answered

Some people will answer and some won’t. Be sure to reply to the ones who did, even if they rejected your request for help.

Follow up with the people who said they will help out, and make sure you get the needed feedback from them.

As long as you’re reading this

I too have an ask — please take a few minutes of your time to check out our product and provide feedback, it will greatly help us improve! Click here to get started.