Empowering Engagement: Navigating Beta Testing in Product Development

In this episode, we discuss how to identify, invite and recruit beta users for your product. Rick uses one of his ventures as an example, and Tyler helps him work through structuring a beta program for his software-enabled service idea. While we worked through a specific situation, the general concept applies often. Here’s the framework that emerged:

• Decide if you are ready for a beta program. 
  • Here’s how you’ll know:
    • The minute you feel you can offer users something of value, you’re ready. 
    • If you aren’t there, you may need to do more customer interviews to validate your idea(s).
• Design your beta program. 
  • Ask yourself the following questions:
    • What are you trying to learn / test?
    • Is a closed or open beta more appropriate?
    • What the profile of your ideal beta user?
    • How can you position the program to these beta users?
      • What is your differentiating theme?
      • What is your offer / value proposition?
    • Should you / do you need to incentivize participation?
• Launch the program and recruit beta users.
  • Ask yourself the following questions:
    • Where do the ideal beta users hang out?
    • Can I find enough ideal beta users via my network?
    • If not, how can I leverage other marketing channels?
• Execute the program.
  • Ask yourself the following questions:
    • How can I make my beta users feel like they are part of the journey?
    • What incentives can I offer to reward users?
    • How can I build a one-to-one relationship with each beta user? 
    • How can I improve the offering?

Takeaways:

• Don’t add too much structure to start. 
  • Start out with as little structure as possible and then iterate your way to more structure when it adds value or scalability based on learnings.
• Launch a beta as soon as you can add value. 
  • As soon as you can offer anything to anybody, get it out there and start testing it with real users.
  • The productized service approach to MVPs allows a lot more room for error in the software because you can lean on the service component for immediate value.
• When looking for beta users, tap your network first.
  • If you can't do it with networking, you're probably not networking enough or you’re not good at it. 
    • Alternatively, you can go out and use traditional marketing channels to find people who might be beta testers, but you have to go into it expecting a high investment, whether it's in time, or money, or whatever, because your pitch isn't refined yet, your product isn't refined yet, you don't even know who to target. 
    • Traditional marketing works, it's just you have to bring in a ton of people at the top of the funnel to get one good early adopter.
• How to get the most out of beta users
  • Invite your beta users to be part of the journey. 
    • The people who do beta tests, a lot of times they do it because they see some big potential. 
    • Start with the why, and really get people on board with the mission and the reason you're doing it. 
    • The more you can let them in and not just tell them why you're doing it, but make them feel like they're contributing to it, the more engaged they'll be.
  • Offer unexpected incentives like swag and gift cards.
  • Spend time one-on-one with your early users to build real trust-based relationships.
    • Do it in person if you can.
  • Avoid offering incentives that could become the primary motivator for a user joining your beta program.

Context

Rick: So specifically with my health insurance app, I actually didn't expect to be where I am today, I'm ahead of schedule. I now have everything I need to actually launch a beta product. So I was anticipating having this be more of a hypothetical conversation, but I will actually have ... I can guarantee a product in the next couple of weeks that people can sign up for as beta users. So what I want to get out of this conversation is I want to brainstorm some ways to gain beta users for this product. I don't just want anyone on the internet to sign up. Because this is a health insurance thing, they need to be in Utah, because that's where I'm licensed. They need to be consumers of individual health insurance. So it's a very narrow focus. So anyway, it's not like I can just go post this on Google Ads or go invite all my best friends, because most of my best friends don't live in Utah. So it's difficult. So I want to brainstorm some ways to identify, invite, and recruit them. Recruit would mean them actually agreeing to the beta program. The second is once they've agreed to participate in the beta program, keeping them active and engaged, whether that's with incentives or with just guilt. That's what I want to talk about. I can add some context ... I guess any clarifying questions about what I want to get out of this?

Tyler: Yeah, well, it sounds ... I mean, getting a beta user, a beta tester is probably not radically different from getting a customer, but the goals are a little different. The goal is to learn instead of to make money, and the type of person you're looking for is someone on the very, very cutting edge of the adoption curve. But like a lot of concepts, this is going to be a specific type of marketing we're talking about here, I guess.

Rick: Exactly. I envision these people ... I want these people to be evangelists of the community. I want them to care about the problem I'm solving as much as I do. And they will get free access. I don't know exactly what the value of that is yet, but hopefully they'll help me figure it out. But I think that the right beta user for this particular product, which I'll go into, is someone who cares deeply about the problem that exists today that the app promises to solve eventually.

Tyler: Cool. So let's dive into ... we can talk generally about how to get beta users, but I think it's helpful to know what product we're actually trying to get. You said earlier there's three things you're doing. One is a thing with Sable, your wife. One is a GroupCurrent thing. But that's not what we're talking about here. You have a specific healthcare, health insurance type of product. Can you talk about what that is?

Rick: Yeah. So on the last episode, I was a little bit hesitant to talk about it because it is in the same realm of health insurance as my previous company, PeopleKeep. I do have a restriction on where I can play. I was kind of put on the spot on the podcast and I didn't feel comfortable talking about it without thinking about it more. So having thought about it, there is no issue. This is non-competitive. Not even close. I feel comfortable talking about it. So I'll kind of give you the general premise. Maybe I can work from the problem that I'm focused on and then work down to how I think the MVP will attempt to solve that. Does that work?

Tyler: Yeah, yeah.

The problem to solve

Rick: Okay, so there's a huge problem out there in that people who buy individual health insurance largely don't get any service in exchange for the commission that they get taken out of their premium. So every time you pay a health insurance premium, whether it's a group policy through y...