How to manage a community of beta testers?

Discussions
#1

Hey all,

What services do you use to manage a community of beta testers?

I would like to have alist of my testers, the ability to email them all, and also a private forum where they can give feedback on the feedback. A private little community basically.

I found mobilize.io which seems to hit the nail on the head. Has anybody used their services?

How do you handle this?

Thanks, Oliver

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#2

Interesting tool, I just signed up

you may want to engage with them on PH…

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#3

I totally get the want to have a product specifically for this, but what about for an FB group?

I just wonder if adding one more thing for ppl is too much? Open to hearing criticism.

I’m about to do a beta launch but would like to know more about the proper way to run it. I have an idea, but the gneral thing is to test whether my hypothesis is right that this is useful for them and how often they use it.

#4

Not everybody is on FB or want to use it for this kind of thing (some ppl like to keep FB stuff strictly personal).

#5

And even less people will want to create a mobilize account just to give you feedback. It cuts both ways.

Personally I just make it easy for people to contact me the way they want (https://blog.kowalczyk.info/contactme.html), I make it clear that I invite feedback and for my product I have a Discourse forum (https://forum.sumatrapdfreader.org/).

I don’t care about “private” part but I think discourse could be configured that way.

I wouldn’t over-think it (perfect being enemy of good) and I also wouldn’t assume that people really want e-mail blasts from you.

I also wouldn’t expect great engagement. My guess-estimate is that the ratio of “users” to “users willing and capable of giving meaningful feedback” is at least 1/100, so unless you have thousands of users, don’t expect much in the way of the feedback and even less in way of meaningful feedback.

#6

And even less people will want to create a mobilize account just to give you feedback.

Right but the advantage of Mobilize is my users can interact with it without creating an account. They can just reply to emails and never sign up. I think they can even vote on polls without signing up.

I also wouldn’t expect great engagement.

That’s expected from a public beta, but I am making my beta private (invitation only).