How makers stay productive

There's a few sites geared for beta releases. Betabound, Betalist, and Betapage. The rest is on you, unless you want to pay.

We did some F&F at first, and then focused on lead generation. We're building a community, so we need to find out where our users hang out on the Internet. It's the same for any product. Do a lot of outreach on your own, talk to people. It's a grind. I'm using Reddit, and rigged F5bot to search for relevant terms and I follow up myself.

It's gonna take a bit of time, but all you need is 6-10 people. Just space the tests out. Test with 3 people at a time so you can get clarity and then iterate, test again.

I would also like to hear people's thought on this as well.

Currently I am testing everything myself as I build. Eventually, I'll need to hand this off to another capable human who focuses on testing.

At my regular 9 - 5, they outsource QA to another company, I feel as if there's a good chance some good, relatively low priced QA testers might be present on Upwork. That's where I plan to go for the knitty gritty "does it work?", "is it secure?", "could there be bugs?" type of testing.

Here's some examples from a quick search on Upwork (just filtered for QA and price $10 - $30). There's people who charge under $10 as well:

https://www.upwork.com/ab/profiles/search/?q=QA&rate=10-30&pt=independent&user_pref=2

Cypress! (Write automated tests)

I have both unit tests (using Jest) and E2E tests (using Cypress) which essentially simulates the user testing part. Just make sure you have good coverage and you will be fine. I have the tests run automatically before deploying which if they fail then the deployment doesn't hit production.

I am building a white-label community platform and I am personally reaching out to community creators on IndieHackers, Twitter, requesting them to give our alpha test site a spin. So far, I have had little luck but I'm trying. I think putting our test site before the right eyes ahead of our launch will help us with its core features.