In order to make that a pleasant experience for everyone, there are a few recommendations and guidelines that we adhere to. Our team will vet the applications and get in touch with you if your proposal is a good fit.
That list will be maintained based on the feedback from our testers and existing startups, so here we go:
You offer a product. We accept a broad range of products and services, but don’t pitch us with “web design services” or “SEO optimization”.
Your product is testable. As much as we like newsletter subscriptions and video courses, that’s likely not a good fit for us. Our community can help you to validate different use cases, try out the overall feature set and usability of the product, and get back to you with some feedback.
The access to your beta product is free for our community. It would be odd if you apply for beta testing and actually try to sell your product. It’s possible that the free license is limited, but it’s highly recommended to provide free “lifetime” licenses to our testers.
Your entire process is documented and clear for our team. If your idea is a good fit for us, we will list you in our weekly newsletter. Our testers should be able to navigate to a specific resource (usually a URL to your website or a PDF) describing your expectations, what’s your product all about, in what stage is the product right now, and how can they sign up or get the demo. We understand that there are different deliverables such as: web products, mobile applications or desktop solutions as well, but the gist is – make the process and your product overview clear and easy enough for testers to be able to get on board.
You have feedback channels available to your testers. The main goal of our community is to play with your product and see if they like it. In order to get some quality feedback, a bug tracker, forum or a ticketing system (even email/IM) should be in place. The easier it is for your users, the more the feedback you’ll get and make your product better.
Your product is in beta, or pre-launch. In reality, we try to avoid the following situations: 1) Your product is way too rough and isn’t usable at all. 2) You seek exposure for a well-known and established product. Either way we are looking for new solutions that require some user attention before launching to the wide public.
Bottom line: unless you offer financial reward to our testers, it’s completely up to them whether they will test your product, or not. You can make your pitch and short description more interesting and the process easier to use in order to increase the number of interested users. Keep in mind that mobile or desktop applications could limit the number of available users (for example, Android phone owners won’t be able to test your iOS app).
What We Need
Our newsletter covers 5 startups each week. Each startup is listed with its name, small image (thumbnail, demo screenshot) and 2-3 sentences of short description. The title links to the product’s homepage. At the end of the short description we will link to the documentation that our testers could navigate to in order to sign up for your product and bug tracking software and start playing with it.
In order to make it work successfully, please list all of the above in the email, example:
Name: MegaStartup Link: yourwebsite.com Short description: some info for our massive product Instructions: check out this google docs file with details Image: some large and thumbnail image that we can use Feedback: link to the trac or so system if not listed in Instructions
Important Note: We have 80+ startups in our queue right now. For a limited time we will launch our newsletter twice a week, and some submission will be processed over the next several weeks. If your public launch is soon, let us know in advance.
If you are ready to apply, go back to the Startups page and fill in your product overview – and we’ll schedule you for the email list.