Wade Foster, cofounder of Zapier, shared his experience of finding hundreds of beta users for their “no name” company, convincing them to start paying for an unfinished product and scaling a company to a multi billion dollar valuation in this episode of Indie Hackers.
Wade’s advice for finding ideas with proven demand was to dig into online forums. He poured over forum after forum for major tech companies such as Salesforce and Google, and discovered a common complaint amongst posts. He noticed that many nontechnical people were complaining for feature implementations that could be easily solved by using available APIs. Their solution was to provide nontechnical people an easy drag and drop interface to use these APIs. It started with a few paid beta users that were found via the forums and then tailoring the app to these users needs. Zapier charged them $100 so that they could be sure these users were serious. Many were more than willing to pay. After getting several initial beta users, they charged subsequent beta users only $10 until they had enough feedback to justify launching the product officially. They all were working real jobs and building this at night for 9 months. After they were accepted to Y Combinator they quit their jobs and moved to SF to get the company off the ground. Now they are a remote first company with a worldwide workforce.
The biggest takeaway was to 1) look to forums for ideas and 2) force beta users to pay so that you get committed users. Free users will come, kick the tires, make bad feature requests, then leave. Paid users will ask for features that help them stay paying.