BetaList. The Good. The Bad. The Tequila.
I was out with my roommates at 10 pm when I get a notification that Respond Flow was tagged on BetaList ‘s Twitter 😱🎉
Respond Flow had been featured on their directory. So we quickly got another drink, plopped down on a sofa outside the bar and started scrambling to answer questions on our phones🤳.
Never a better excuse to awkwardly sit in a circle, drink tequila 🥃, and stare obsessively at our phones while everyone else partied around us.
BetaList is a great way to get seen and heard for any online startup. I made this article to hopefully help others have a successful launch and also learn from our mistakes.
The Application
We were actually rejected the first time we applied to BetaList.
Our pitch wasn’t appealing. Although we listed all the features of our product, we never marketed the problem we were solving, nor the results that came along with it.
This is the biggest hurdle for those in SaaS. We love to talk about the technology and not a lot about the results or the problem it solves 🤖🙃.
After some revisions we were accepted the second time around 🎊.
Here is the accepted application :
Pre-Launch
After being accepted into BetaList, we had to prepare ourselves. BetaList doesn’t tell you when you’ll be featured on their directory, they just leave you with an ambiguous message.
That’s why we researched past successful launches so that we were prepared to get the most out of this opportunity (I made a list of the articles that we read at the end of the article)
1.Prepare your landing page
One of the benefits we saw to launching on BetaList, was that it’s a great way to test how well your website converts visitors. This made BetaList an exceptional way to test before our bigger launch on Product Hunt.
Although it’s a test, take it seriously. BetaList is an amazing opportunity to sign up beta users to your platform as well as find early customers. Make sure your copy, user experience, and overall design is smart.
2. Have a way to capture leads
It goes without saying, not everyone who visits your website is ready to be a customer. Leave a way for your customers to leave their information to either learn more or to stay in the loop regarding your product’s progress.
What I’d recommend is creating a drip campaign to automatically send messages after people leave their information this can be done via email….. and even SMS 😉 (Shameless plug: www.respondflow.com)
3. Be ready to talk to your potential customers
When your product goes live on BetaList, you will have an influx of comments on both your BetaList page, as well as your social media.
Not only is this an important part in getting feedback on your product, but it also gives you an opportunity to educate and sell your product for those who may want to talk to an actual person.
Either way, your social media will light up when you go live.
Launch
No matter how much you plan, you won’t be prepared for everything that happens. Our team found out we were launched as were were going out to bars.
We had to move quickly. We knew the first hour was the most important part of the launch. Though we had little to no notice, we still needed to get as many likes as possible to get on the Startup of the day/week list.
That’s why we sat down with a drink in hand and started texting, snapping, tindering🔥- anything that would get the message out that Respond Flow was on BetaList.
Being inexcusably bold is the key to getting seen without spending money to promote your launch.
Post, text, and self promote yourself like a champ. If you don’t, no one else will.
After promoting ourselves for 1 hour we were up 22 likes as well as 14 comments. This clinched us a spot as a trending product, startup of the day, as well as startup of the week 🚀.
Get early traction so that your product is trending . More exposure is always good exposure. Take advantage of your networks.
Results
Enough about vanity metrics. Although getting engagement on BetaList is important to maximize reach, getting people onto your site to sign up is what’s most important.
These graphs shows how we went from 20–30 visitors a day to 137+ a day.
Like all good things, increased traffic is never sustainable. After the spike of hope we now have 40–50 daily average users of which 20 are new visitors.
As for actual signups… we didn’t have many. 4 people signed up for our 12-day free trial and only 2 continued on to become paying customers. Obviously we were getting attention from people, but weren’t converting them to customers 😕. (More on this in the next section)
Shortfalls and Failures
We didn’t get what we were hoping for from BetaList, but we have a few ideas why. Hopefully others can learn from our mistakes.
Landing Page Conversion
We knew going into this experiment that we were ultimately testing how well our website converted visitors. Although we did our best, we were far from perfect.
We found out really quickly that we had a leaky bucket problem. The site had plenty of website traffic, we were not converting the majority of them into paying customers.
After taking this feedback from our experiment, we made a few changes.
1.Website Copy
This was the same problem we faced when first applying to BetaList. We had not accurately expressed the problem we solved.
Here is what we settled on:
2.CTAs
Although we had a CTA, it was pretty weak and didn’t engage the visitor to take any action. After reassessing, we decided to create a clear CTA to sign up for our platform, not the free trial, as well as offer a demo for anyone who would want to see the product.
Lead Generation Magnets
Gated content that requires visitors to put their contact information to receive the content.
Having a few lead gen magenets on our page is something that we feel would have allowed us to capture more leads. Although we use Intercom to capture most of our leads conversationally, not everyone wants to talk to a person or chatbot.
Creating multiple ways for customers to leave their information would have helped not only our leaky bucket problem, but also allowed us to nurture those leads over time.
Conclusion
At the end of the mayhem, we were a team that got to enjoy this wild moment with each other. We tested our product, saw where we could improve, and grew our follower base. Definitely worth the time spent.
Findings
- +30 likes on our BetaList post: https://betalist.com/startups/respond-flow
- +20 social followers for each channel
- 6xed our traffic and boosted our average daily visitors from 20 to 50 a day.
- Reassurance to keep TESTING/LEARNING/REPEAT
