A little while ago someone on here posted about their "$9 startup", and how they've grown a huge mailing list of signups without writing any code. I think you're falling in to a similar trap they had: confusing signups with users and potential customers.

The number of people who sign up from places like friends of friends, Betali.st, etc is vanity. It doesn't actually count for anything unless you can turn them in to paying users, which is incredibly unlikely given that they're a completely random bunch of "people interested in startups". It's the difference between being interested in your product and being interested in solving the pain that your product solves. People pay for the latter. People just cost you money if they're the former, albeit not much.

The two metrics that really matter are how many people use your application and how many people pay for your application. You could get a million signups and still fail.

Sorry if this sounds harsh. I learnt this particular lesson the hard way. My advice: work out who your potential users are, who decides to buy the products they use, and market directly to them. Ignore everything else.

Good story, but I think you are forgetting that they are just after Beta users to test their product and find flaws and bugs. They will most likely finish Beta and then focus on growing their user-base with people who are likely to pay for their product.

Beta testers don't necessarily have to be the customers who are going to stay with you forever.

but those are the worst beta testers. Because they'll give you useless feedback like "that color looks ugly", or "you need to make that font anti-aliased" rather than "I wish I could export this data to Excel so I can run calculations from it" or "I wish this could integrate with Mailchimp and generate email reports to show to my boss".

Valid point, good feedback. Thanks for sharing your war-story!

I would love to read a follow-up of sign-up numbers after you've been sitting on the top of HN for today :)

We've had some really good luck with HN for sign-ups in the past, and if you're being transparent about it, I'd love to hear how the numbers turn out for you.

I agree, an update to their blog post with HN numbers would be cool

Good breakdown, what about socialmedia referrals? Surely people that have tried the app have also tweeted about it, do you have any insights of how many tweets have been mentioning your product over the past few months?

good question. We actually didn't have sharing buttons on our home + the fact that we had a really really minimalistic homepage for a long time limited the "viral" leverage.

That said for our public beta it'll be a focus.

Note: Betalist only features products that are in private beta and not out in public beta.

Where? Growth Hacking lol.

Vanity Metric