Building a beta community for your product
When I was in High school I studied sociology, where I learned about the structure of groups, organizations, societies and how people interact within these contexts. The sense of belonging, this feeling of being a part of something, is one aspect of our lives that changed tremendously thanks to online opportunities. Today, as a Product Manager I’m using these amazing possibilities that the Internet gave us to impact the growth of my product and my company.
3 years ago I founded a beta community for my product, back then I couldn’t imagine the powerful value my users and I would get out of it. As the community continues to grow I was able to use it to get to know my users and my product better, to research and develop new features, and to make sure I build the best product I can for my users. In this post I’ll share the process we went through to create and engage with our awesome community.
Why build a community?
In 2017 I joined a young startup company as the first Product Manager, I was tasked to define and build the product-development process. The main challenges we were facing that we couldn’t answer internally were:
- From a product perspective, I needed to be able to get feedback from users quickly, without having to constantly recruit new users for each feature.
- From a development perspective, we wanted to be sure our updates are stable and ready for production.
- From a QA perspective, working on a connected device (IOT) means that testing our product is a lot harder because we couldn’t really simulate the full user experience in a lab.
Taking all of this into account made us realize that if we build a group of beta testers we can answer all these needs and make sure there’s always someone available if we need to test or validate anything. You might ask yourself so why not just make sure you have enough beta testers? Why does it need to be a community?
While Beta users are great to have, as individuals they usually fade away after a while. I was looking at the long term. My plan was to offer them more value by helping them get this sense of belonging, which will hopefully incentivise them to stay active longer.
Let’s get to building
There are five key elements to building a good beta community:
Are you ready for this commitment?
Before you go into this adventure, ask yourself — am I ready for this commitment? Managing a community will become part of your daily routine, it’s an obligation you take upon yourself that you’ll have to keep up, no matter what. This is a give and take relationship, and you can’t expect your beta users to give feedback and report issues without giving them something in return, even if it’s time consuming and not always easy to troubleshoot.
Your users will now become people, real people you are going to engage with. They love or care for your product because it makes their lives better in some way, that’s their motivation to help you. You, as the community manager, will become the face of the product for them, and it’s your responsibility to make sure they feel appreciated.
The platform
The platform you choose will affect the nature of your community, which makes it one of the most important decisions you’re going to make, and this can make or break the success of your community. The best place is where your users are already located, a place that is part of their daily routine. If you decide to onboard them to a new platform you need to take into account that they won’t use it as often as you like, or even at all.
For my target audience, new parents between the ages of 25–45, I decided to go with Facebook groups, as I knew it is a platform most of them use almost daily. Other options for platforms that might work for other audiences can be Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp or Reddit.
Distribution
When thinking of recruiting users, keep in mind the question of which types of users you have. For me one filtering question was which phone they have, as part of my product is a mobile app, and I needed a wide range of users with different operating systems.
If you’re going to ask your beta users to install beta apps or versions, make sure the process is as easy as possible. For app distribution I decided to use TestFlight for iOS and Play store for Android:
- TestFlight is a platform for developers to easily install their apps on beta testers’ phones without first putting them in the App Store, and allows them to collect crash reports and user feedback in a central location. Our beta users get push notifications when there’s a new app update, and they can see exactly what changes the app version has.
- For Android the situation was a bit harder. The Play store didn’t have an alternative to TestFlight back in 2018, and we didn’t want to use APKs. So eventually we decided to duplicate our app and upload it to the Play store as a hidden app. Only users who are registered as beta users can see it and download it, simple and familiar.
The people
When I started recruiting I defined that the beta users that I’ll recruit need to be technical people, ones that will feel comfortable trying new things and use app versions even if they are not 100% stable.
My first audience was tech geeks, people (like me) who love technology and get a kick out of talking about it. These people will usually be those who will care enough to tweet about your product or send a long email to customer support with feature requests and lengthy bug reports. This is how I found the first beta users, and after a short onboarding process they joined the FB group and started being active.
In the long run, however, looking at support tickets and Tweets became ineffective, there weren’t enough people to target and I needed more. The next thing we did was to build a process to automatically recruit new beta users who answer a specific criteria. The process starts with an email with a screener survey. In the survey we ask them a few basic questions about the product to see what types of answers they give, lengthy and detailed or short and concise. Those who give the detailed answers are the ones who usually get in. A set of automatic zaps takes care of the rest of the process of sending the NDA and following up with instructions to join the beta apps and FB group after they sign.
The community
For a community to actually become a community and not just another random collection of people they need to be able to form meaningful relationships with one another. My previous attempts with beta users showed me that usually after they sign up, some will stay active for a while, but then with time they fade away. I needed a community of people that will stay involved and will stay in touch, and for that they had to get value from the group.
To achieve my goal I had to leverage what they all had in common — my product. So in between posts about beta apps and bug reports I started posting personal questions: tell us how you use the product, what’s your routine, share pictures and examples, what other products do you love and use, what is the number one feature you are missing. When people started commenting they started to get to know each other, which eventually made this group into a community. Some of the users started to shine in the group and everyone knows them as “that person who will answer the questions before Tali even sees them”, and others are just welcoming and supporting and make everyone feel right at home.
If you only take one advice from this post, let it be this one: Allow your users to express themselves. They should be able to start conversations that are relevant to their world even if they are not necessarily about your product but about your domain. Allow them to feel that this space that you created for them is really for them, and with time this will set the foundation of your community.
My beta community is about to celebrate its third year soon. I personally feel like I learned a lot from the experience and it made me a better Product Manager. I never felt more connected to my users, which means I can make better product decisions. This community is one of the best parts of my job, and I’m forever grateful to all the members who are part of it.
Please let me know in the comments, are you building your own community as well? Does your product already have an active beta community? Would you like to know more about how to actually manage the day-to-day aspects of the beta community?
