Day 3: How I Collected Signups for My Private Beta

product

Here’s how I went about announcing the Hide Feed private beta:

  • Changed the call-to-action on my landing page from “Install” to “Get Early Access”:

  • Set up a Google Form to collect email addresses (thought about signing up for Typeform to make the form look better but that doesn’t seem like the best use of my time right now):

  • Posted the private beta announcement on Facebook and Twitter:

    • I posted a short video of the extension in action rather than a link to the extension landing page because I remembered hearing somewhere that Facebook’s feed algorithm prefers native content over externally linking content, which seems plausible assuming that Facebook wants to keep people on their site rather than having them leave

    • I also asked people to comment on the post rather than link them directly to the Google Form because because comments = engagement = it shows up on more people’s feeds

      • The flip side of this is that if no one is interested, everyone will know because there are no comments (as opposed to a Google Form where you can’t tell how many other people signed up). That might scare you off doing this if you’re afraid of failing publicly but I’d encourage doing it anyway just to overcome the fear of failure.

    • I’m not completely sure how I feel about using these sorts of “growth hacker” techniques because it makes me feel a bit gross to try to make Facebook algorithm rank my stuff better but at the same time, these ones feel fairly innocuous. It’s the same feeling I get with SEO techniques. Obviously there’s a spectrum between “harmless/good practices in general” and “scummy/manipulative” among different techniques, but the purist in me dislikes the idea of putting any effort toward trying to manipulate some algorithm rather than just putting stuff out there and expecting that it’ll succeed if the content is good. Sadly, I guess I’m skeptical about how well that actually works in practice.

    • I didn’t do anything special for Twitter because I’m new to the platform and don’t have any h0t gr0wth h4ck3r techniques. I probably should’ve included emoji in my tweets so it’s not just all text, but that didn’t occur to me until later and unlike Facebook posts, tweets can’t be edited.

And then I waited. And nothing happened.

Or at least it seemed that way for a while. Every time I post something like this on social media, I notice the emotional thrashing around wanting it to do well but also knowing that it doesn’t really matter. This usually manifests as checking the post frequently throughout the day rather than just letting it do its thing. Since I’ve experienced this quite a few times now, I’m starting to accept that those feelings will come up for the first several hours / the first day and I just need to wait it out until they eventually subside into equanimity where I just accept what happens and move on rather than getting fixated on how well some post did. But maybe as I do this more often, the intensity of those feelings will grow weaker and weaker until they have little to no emotional impact? I definitely feel like I’m less sensitive to stuff like this than I was several years ago. Guess I’ll find out.

In my Facebook post, I included a comment to the landing page so that people can learn more about the extension, so some people ended up signing up via the Google Form rather than the Facebook post. As of right now, here’s how many people have signed up for the beta:

  • Through Facebook comments: 15

  • Through the Google Form: 10

    • At least 8 of the people who signed up through the Google Form are my Facebook friends, so at most 2 people came from Twitter. I’m hoping that in the future, it’ll be the other way around, meaning that I’ll have more of an audience around the stuff I make rather than personal friends who are interested in what I’m doing (which I’m grateful to have!)

Total number of beta testers: 23 (2 people signed up via both Facebook and the Google Form)

That seems like a pretty good number to get a diverse number of opinions. I’m going to share the unlisted Chrome extension link with them and then follow up with questions about their thoughts maybe after about 4 days.

Here’s what I sent to each person who opted to be a beta tester:

hey! thanks for offering to beta test hide feed 🙏🏽

here’s the the link to install it: <link>

after you’ve had some time to use it, i’ll send over some questions but in the meantime, feel free to message me at any time with comments, questions, suggestions, or anything else that comes to mind (both positive and critical feedback are welcome)

I wanted to write about the larger vision and plan I have around the things I want to build this year but this ended up becoming super long and I want to start working so I’ll save that for tomorrow or another day.