A random user who is coming to my site to win something who is probably not even in my demographic. And you want me to pay for this?
Ask HN: You're in beta. How much $ is 1,000 random users worth?
11–14 of 14 posts
Re: Ask HN: You're in beta. How much $ is 1,000 random users worth?
#12If you would get value from people signing up, just testing your services you'd probably be better taking the money you would use to buy the ipad and posting on Mechanical Turk.
You'd then get a good number of people to sign up to use your service, they could even do a screencast of their interactions, how they navigate your services and common places where users get stuck.
Asking and paying for direct feedback will be far more useful than buying users with no interaction requirements and hoping for some meaning to arise from your stats.
Least after the testing is done you can purge your system of the testing accounts and then you know who your genuine users are.
Re: Ask HN: You're in beta. How much $ is 1,000 random users worth?
#13Literally nothing, or less. Sounds like a worthless headache.
Re: Ask HN: You're in beta. How much $ is 1,000 random users worth?
#14I'd offer them some kind of premium features and/or discounts later down the product (time)line.
Sorry, I revised the question -- I'm basically asking, what you'd pay on top of the premium. To boil it down, I want to know what you are willing to pay to acquire a random user.
Sorry, wouldn't pay a dime. This is a little akin to buying 1000 twitter followers. Sure they'll give you apparent social proof, but you'll have a hard time selling to them. What you are really asking is how much is an unqualified lead worth. You can buy random traffic all day, but if none of them purchase/upgrade its worthless to you.
You have to ask yourself if you really think that you can convert any of these users. There is a world of difference between targeted and untargeted traffic. You probably wouldn't even get any usable metrics out of the deal.
You are also talking about an investment of 2 bucks per user, and you could almost do better with a basic cpc campaign. You'd end up spending a bit more, but you be much more targeted.