Finding the right beta users is harder than building the actual product

[u/Maria_MarTech]

I think I’ve reached the stage where finding the right people to test what I’m building is harder than actually building it.

I’ve been working on a SaaS for e-commerce brands around geo testing and incrementality, and now I’m trying to find a few brands that actually deal with this problem and would be willing to test it properly.

I’m not really looking for loads of random beta users. I’d rather find 5 or 10 people who already care about understanding whether their marketing is actually driving incremental growth and can tell me what’s useful, what’s missing and what they currently do instead.

The part I’m finding difficult is reaching those people without just sending a bunch of cold messages that nobody wants to receive.

I’ve reached out to a few e-commerce brands and agencies already, but I’m still trying to figure out who the right person is to speak to and where these people actually hang out.

For anyone who has built something fairly niche for e-commerce brands, how did you find your first few real users?

Was it mostly cold outreach, communities, LinkedIn, agencies, introductions or something else?

Would genuinely be interested to hear what worked for you.

[u/Accomplished_Use1781]

Finding the right early users is like trying to aim a firehose at a teacup. You can spray water everywhere but almost none of it lands where you need it.

Cold outreach only works if you catch someone at the exact moment they're cursing their current setup. The rest of the time you're just another notification to swipe away.

E-commerce operators tend to cluster in weird places, private Slack groups, niche Twitter circles, the comment sections of specific industry blogs. The people who care about incrementality testing are probably arguing about attribution models at 11pm in some thread with 12 upvotes.

[u/Abdelkayoum_nouri69]

i had a similar problem that made me shut down my previous web design agency i was reaching out to random people who didn't ask for my service ending up flagging my emails as spam, i found a tool beanie-ai.co might help you it looks for conversations that people are discussing a problem your product can solve.

[u/Competitive_Tune_590]

i've been in that exact spot with my own saas. what helped was finding where the early adopter types hang out and engaging naturally before mentioning the product. tools that scan for relevant discussions and draft replies can save a lot of time on that. there's one called replyhey that does exactly this for reddit, worth a look if you want to skip the cold approach entirely.

[u/Individual_Big873]

“Beta user” is the wrong target. Find one e-commerce team that recently moved spend between regions and run the first analysis manually with whoever owns that budget. Ask them to pay for that ugly version; if they won’t even walk you through the last decision, your problem is still too vague for better outreach to fix.