How I Got 100+ App Testers For Free With 10 Minutes Effort

Hello 👋

Martin here. Welcome to another edition of Founders’ Hustle!

I produce content about the “hustle” of entrepreneurship and building startups.

Today I’m sharing how I recently attracted 100+ app testers for free by investing only 10 minutes of time.

• I didn’t need a big social media account, connections, or luck. 🍀

• I kept them engaged for 3 months despite delays and a crazy buggy app. 🐛

• One of them turned out to be a Test Engineer and was a superstar! 🤩

Testing new products is one of my favorite things.

You formulate a hypothesis, build an experience to test it, and then put it out there for folks to try out.

Except, that last part can be kind of tricky.

I recently found myself in a position where my team had built our (first ever!) iOS game and we wanted to try it out with a small group of testers on a qualitative basis.

Nothing big. Small and cozy so we could have an intimate dialogue with testers, get feedback, and surface major issues.

Pretty much like a focus group meets quality assurance mash-up.

The game is called Spin Trivia.

A multiplayer fusion of slots and trivia. 🎰 +💡

There are services out there you can use to get very early feedback from paid testers, like PlaytestCloud, but they obviously come at a price and the communication medium isn’t quite what I was looking for.

I wanted to ‘own’ the relationship and engage testers on my own terms. Plus, if I could onboard them for free even better. That ruled out paid advertising.

Next, I thought about recruiting my friends or friends-of-friends to test the game.

Sadly, none of them fit the demographic we needed. Plus, I’ve tried this before and found it difficult to neutralize ‘friend bias’.

I then considered utilizing organic social channels. But, quickly concluded the investment in terms of hours would be too much versus the results we were looking to achieve.

Basically, in order to do that, I would’ve needed to build a network or follower base of our target demographic from scratch.

Then, I remembered a tweet I saw regarding using job ads as a user acquisition tool.

So, I headed over to Indeed and put up a free listing requesting testers for our app.

The ‘pitch’ lends itself well to games.

Here’s what it looked like 👇

As you can see, I conveyed the type of experience folks should expect and was upfront about it being unpaid participation.

I figured an unpaid listing wouldn’t be a problem since there are tons of zero-pay internship-type posts on Indeed.

As it turns out, Indeed did not agree. Ooops.

They suspended my account after a few days… citing a breach of T&Cs.

It was one of those ‘ask for forgiveness not permission’ type situations.

Not that it mattered, by that time my inbox was already flooded with applications.

Over 100 people wanted to be testers. ❤️

Here’s what happened next…

The Test Group

My goal was to get our testers psychologically invested ASAP.

Why? There were some significant friction points:

🚀 Launch was one month away.

✈️ TestFlight (awkward install for target demographic).

🐛 Super buggy app that crashed a lot.

🎲 Unconventional game experience.

Basically, I didn't want everyone to ‘bounce’ quickly or never download the game because they lost interest or became frustrated and confused. It just wouldn’t deliver the results we were looking for.

That was easily possible without a supporting narrative.

Psychological investment was needed for players to have the motivation to push through these friction points.

Put another way, I needed to calibrate their minds to be patient and accepting of the many imperfections of the experience.

How did I achieve that? Emails!

I sent out email updates every 2 days or so.

Inside each email, I hyped the game and pushed:

🔎 Game teasers

🛠️ Development updates

🎁 Competitions

Here’s a preview:

Engagement with these emails was strong—40%+ open rates.

Often, I drip-fed three-game previews per email:

In particular, competitions were a key lever to establishing a two-way dialogue.

One of them was a multiple-choice trivia game. I’d ask a question and folks would reply with their answer.

To do that, I took a screenshot from the game and pasted it in the email. This way testers could ‘kind of’ play the game before we released it.

Here’s how that looked:

Doing this kept a core group of sign-ups keenly engaged until the app was ready to download.

Release day came and I stepped up email frequency to daily.

Why? It was super important to push folks to download the game and remind them to return afterward so they’d start to build a habit.

Our goal was to keep a core group of testers playing for 2-3 weeks or so. This would be enough to achieve our quality assurance and qualitative feedback objectives.

Throughout the entire process, email continued as the primary communication medium to centralize dialogue with players—our target demographic isn’t exactly ‘down with Discord’.

What changed was the content. Post-release it changed to:

🗞️ News (keep testers updated)

🚧 Feedback zone (share bug reports, suggestions)

🏆 Contests (make testing fun)

I used email to experiment inexpensively with metagames—instead of building the functionality directly into the app. For example tournaments, challenges, and objectives.

This saved a ton of resources and gave strong indications of what worked and what didn’t from a behavioral perspective.

Also, bug finding was ‘gamified’.

Reporting bugs gave testers a boost in a cash-prize contest.

This helped surface a ton of issues.

One tester emailed me a list of bugs pretty much daily, for nearly two months!

She reported every possible major or minor issue you can think of. And, communicated extremely well with timings of issues and steps to reproduce bugs.

This person turned out to be a Test Engineer professionally and was participating in our beta for the fun of it. 😍

Here’s a sample bug report email:

As the first few days turned into a week, I expected testers to rapidly disappear.

Why? Our app was insanely buggy. It crashed constantly. Plus, it was light on content depth since it was just a prototype.

But, that's not what happened. 

A core group of players kept coming back. And, they were setting new playing time records.

One hour per day, three hours per day, four hours per day, six hours per day.

It just kept going up 4-8 weeks post-release. This got me very curious.

So, I jumped on the phone with our top testers by engagement time. They were pretty much all happy and excited to talk to me.

It’s clear the email campaign, and, specifically, the contests promoted within it, had a profound impact on their motivation to keep playing.

Particularly, a tournament.

Testers accrued a score for performing certain actions (playing the game, reporting bugs, etc). We offered a prize for 1st place—$250.

Whoever finished first by the end of the beta period won the prize. Each week I sent out a Top 10 leaderboard, so testers could track their position.

This made testing fun and competitive.

The leaderboard was pretty simple (knocked up in Google Sheets) but highly effective.

Here’s what it looked like:

As the weeks went on top players spent more and more time using the app—motivated by finishing first.

One tester spent nearly 6 whole days playing the game. And, won.

The net result of this is we unlocked a huge amount of value in the form of behavioral insights and bugs.

Without this email dialogue the exercise would have yielded significantly inferior results. Probably most people would have never downloaded the game in the first place, or bounced quickly, due to all of the friction points.

Seriously, it was pretty embarrassing how buggy the app was.

Turning bugs into a reporting contest flipped the experience on it’s his head and sort of made it desirable to encounter them.

This approach can be tweaked to work across virtually any B2C vertical.

Until next time!

Martin 👋

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