If you’re an early stage startup, you’re probably looking forward to the day that you’ll be featured in Techcrunch or Mashable. You’ll get thousands of users and the world will be beautiful.
If you’re an early stage startup however you might have only coded a prototype and put a landing page up to accept some signups. You have your minimum viable product (MVP) in hand, you’re eager to get your first customers and have them test your product.
Here’s where Betali.st comes in.
What’s Betalist?
Betali.st helps people discover and get access to the latest internet startups. They’ve been operating since 2010 and have over 6,000 people following them on twitter and thousands more subscribed to their email newsletter.
After we submitted our listing here, it took us just a few days to be approved.
Betalist Doesn’t Just List Your Startup
What’s great about Betali.st is they do much more than just list your startup:
1. Betalist tweets out to their followers during the day of your feature
2. Betalist sends an email to everyone on their subscribers list on the day of your listing.
Betalist Results
I was working at a coffee shop when we received an email from Betali.st Founder Marc Kohlbrugge that said our featured listing was up on the site. We started to get a signup every 2 minutes for the first hour and an average of about 1 signup every 6 minutes for the next 24 hours.
We were listed on a Thursday and received a few more signups over the weekend. As of this writing, we’ve received over 250 signups since being listed, with almost no additional promotion apart from a few tweets from our twitter account. I know 250 might not seem like a lot but we’re very happy.
We weren’t really expecting more than 50 signups from Betali.st but this response was definitely awesome.
Our listing was retweeted 147 times (4th most ever on Betali.st).
Tips For Success
What made our listing a success? Here are some pointers if you submit your startup.
1. Take a high quality screenshot of your homepage 
2. Make sure you explain your product enough on your landing page. We made a demo video to do this.
3. Setup invite codes - If people are going to take the time to checkout your site you should give them something.
4. Write a short description. 2-3 sentences that says what problem you solve and how you’re going to do it.
Big Thanks To Everyone Who Signed Up
Our experience with Betali.st was nothing short of awesome.
Thanks again to everyone who signed up. We’re excited to be working with you and we’re so grateful that you took the time to check us out.
List Your Startup On Betalist here
Follow Marc here
Follow Betalist here
Follow ooomf here
If you’ve had an experience with trying to get signups for your project, please share.