By Jordan Elias | June 17, 2024
“We didn’t launch a beta. We launched a trap.”
That’s how Clara DuBois, founder of remote productivity startup ClockNest, describes her team’s first attempt at beta testing. “We thought beta meant early access. What it really was — was a stress test for our assumptions.” The product crashed. The feedback stung. But the lessons were golden.
Too many founders approach beta testing like it’s a formality. In reality, it’s the single most high-leverage opportunity in early product development — and the most misunderstood.
📉 The Common Mistakes
❌ 1. Treating Beta Like a Soft Launch
Founders often mistake a beta for a half-finished product reveal. They worry more about impressions than insights.
“We polished the UI. We set up welcome emails. But we never asked users what problem they hoped we’d solve,” said one founder. “So they logged in, looked around, and left.”
Beta testing isn’t about marketing — it’s about truth-finding. It’s a controlled experiment, not a teaser campaign.
❌ 2. Using Friends and Family as Testers
While it’s tempting to onboard your most supportive network first, this almost always leads to skewed feedback.
Real beta users should:
Match your target persona
Be brutally honest
Have no emotional stake in your success
As Jason Wong, product strategist at Formloop, puts it:
“Your mom thinks it’s cool that you built a scheduling app. But your ideal customer is wondering why it doesn’t integrate with Outlook.”
❌ 3. Not Having Clear Hypotheses
Founders often ship a beta without deciding what success looks like.
Instead, you should ask:
What specifically do we want to learn?
What behavior are we hoping to see?
What metric would tell us if we’re on the right path?
Without hypotheses, you end up reacting to random complaints instead of detecting patterns. Every user becomes a one-person product manager — and chaos follows.
✅ The Right Way to Beta Test
1. Design for Feedback, Not Scale
Strip the product to its core. Then build in friction that forces users to engage with what you most want to learn.
Add an exit survey.
Ask for a 15-minute call after 5 days of usage.
Embed Looms or Notion pages to explain rough edges rather than over-engineer.
2. Give Testers a Role, Not a Freebie
Position testers as collaborators, not customers. They’re not getting early access — they’re helping shape the thing.
This mindset shift increases:
Engagement
Feedback volume
Loyalty after launch
3. Code Less, Ask More
Not everything needs to be live. If you’re unsure about a feature, fake it manually. Founders have validated entire workflows by pretending to be the backend — booking appointments or sending notifications by hand.
🧠 Case Study: The SaaS That Pivoted Mid-Beta
TrelloBoardly, an async team planning tool, began as a clone of project management software — but during beta, testers kept using it as a hiring workflow.
“They ignored the team view,” said founder Alex Hennings. “But everyone hacked it to track applicants. So we pivoted the entire app to become an internal hiring pipeline.”
Today, TrelloBoardly has over 3,000 paying teams — and none of them use it for project management.
📌 The Takeaway
Beta isn’t a smaller launch — it’s a microscope. It doesn’t tell you if your product is beautiful. It tells you if it’s useful. And if it’s not? That’s exactly what you need to know.
The job of a beta test isn’t to confirm your brilliance.
It’s to expose your blind spots.
The best founders don’t fear bad feedback. They seek it — and build better products because of it.
Comments
Leave a Comment