AlphaList blog

Official blog of AlphaList. Don't get high on your own supply.

Founders: Best Practices For AlphaList

We've been thrilled with the response to AlphaList.  Founders and alpha users alike have found real value in our one-a-weekday e-mails and we've been thrilled with just how many alpha users are signing up to try out services and the quality of the feedback they're giving to founders.  With that said, however, there are some best practices founders can do to help ensure that they get higher response rates and the best possible feedback:
  • Be a little more verbose in filling out the three questions.  In particular, "Everybody" is not an answer to "Who Has This Problem?"  500 characters isn't a lot; make each one of them good.
  • If you have obvious competitors, you may want to address them in the "What is your solution to this problem?"  Even if you address them directly in your AlphaList submission, if your landing page or app doesn't reinforce the differences, then you're doing a poor job of explaining your solution.
  • If you don't have a working prototype yet, you should really build an e-mail capture form and submit that as your URL.  Even if you have no website, a quick landing page is good - and spend just a little bit of time to pretty it up.  Both Performable and Unbounce offer free 30 day trials.  
  • Turn off invite code functionality before submitting to AlphaList or include a good-for-many invite code in your product description.  If an alpha user comes to your site, but can't sign up without a code, they are more inclined to leave you poor ratings and dismissive feedback.
  • If your idea doesn't have a name, don't put N/A or "none yet".  The e-mail format to AlphaList has the subject line "AlphaList presents: [x]".  Putting in "a new [industry] idea" is a great way to give alpha users on AlphaList some context for what they're in for.
And, remember: if your idea hasn't gone out to AlphaList yet, you can always log in and edit/update your submission.  Continually coming in and revising your submission so it's totally up-to-date is a good idea; you never know when your idea could be the next one to go out to AlphaList! 

Introducing AlphaList!

Alphalist-logo-screengrab

One of the things that's always confused me is why really smart people spend a lot of time on ideas that aren't really going anywhere.  I get the whole psychology of sunk costs, but at some point, the whole fish-or-cut-bait thing comes to mind.  But rather than try to change people by explaining to them that they're doing it wrong, wouldn't it be better if we just headed off the whole issue at the pass?

That's where AlphaList comes in.  It's a place where founders with an idea or a couple of mockups or a simple prototype can get good feedback from smart, informed alpha users before they spend too much time or too many resources on something that won't work. 

AlphaList is the world's first Customer Discovery app. 

The idea is that founders submit their problem and solution hypotheses, and alpha users who opt-in to receiving one e-mail a day give them informed feedback about their problem and potential solution.  If the alpha users say this looks promising, the founders have some feedback from outside their social circle to take the project to the next level - finding targeted potential users for interviews, designing, coding, whatever.  If the alpha users are more skeptical, hopefully founders will get a better sense that either their problem isn't a big one or that their solution may not be the right approach to that problem.  (Of course, even if alpha users frown on an idea, doesn't mean the company should give up - and nor will it!  Most founders are stubborn as mules.)

AlphaList already has a great base of alpha users giving feedback, with people like Kyle Bragger, Micah Baldwin (congrats on the raise, sir), and Dug Song already on board as alpha users.  (Feedback is aggregated and anonymous, unless the alpha user specifically opts in to making themselves available to communicate one-on-one with the founder(s) on a submission-by-submission basis.) 

Nobody should build something nobody wants.  AlphaList helps founders make better decisions so they don't.