Want Brutal Product Feedback? Charge

Nobody gives you real feedback on something they got for free.

Somebody on the AMA offered to be a guinea pig for something I'm building, and it got me thinking about the order I actually use.

The best guinea pigs are, first, my team. Second, my Insiders. Third, people who are actually paying me.

And you don't really get the real feedback until people are paying you money.

That's what I learned launching Consulti, our cold email lead gen software. We had our team demo it. Then we had our Insiders demo it. I got pretty solid feedback out of both of those rounds.

Then people started paying me for it, and man, it was a whole different level of feedback.

My guess at why: a free tester will tell you what's broken, and a paying customer will tell you what's broken in the exact workflow they needed to finish today.

Free testers aren't lazy, they're just not under the same pressure. Someone testing as a favor pokes at it with whatever part of their day is already flexible. Someone who paid runs it straight into their actual constraints on day one, and their tolerance for a rough edge is zero.

I'm not telling you to skip the friendly rounds. I still run them. My staff is demoing and debugging the next thing I'm building right now, and that round will catch plenty.

Just don't read a clean internal test as evidence that you're ready. Read it as evidence that you removed the obvious problems.

The painful ones are still out there, waiting for somebody with a credit card.

Which group are you testing with right now?

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Want Brutal Product Feedback? Charge