Learning from The First Alpha Testers

Friends,

I've finally started gaining some real momentum this week! After launching the YouTube Guru Checker and sharing it on X, I began seeing a steady stream of new subscribers signing up for the Subscribr waitlist.

With over 160 X followers now watching my journey, I feel energized knowing that people are engaged and excited to try Subscribr once it's ready. All those long hours and radio silence when I first started out made me worry I was headed nowhere fast. But the feedback and responses I'm seeing now reassure me I'm on the right track.

I recently opened up Subscribr for alpha testing with a small group of 5 users. I wanted to start small, catch any major issues early, and gather urgent feedback before expanding access more widely.

I’m doing several things to encourage as much feedback as possible:

1. There is a built in Give Feedback button that users can click to provide feedback as well as upvote the feedback from other users that they like the most (this helps to prioritize feature requests)

2. There are thumbs up/down buttons to provide feedback on the specific recommendations the tool makes

3. I’m offering free subscriptions to the users who provide the most feedback during the alpha and beta testing phases

Here’s what this looks like in the app itself:

Now let’s take a look at some of the feedback I’ve received so far:

The initial feedback has me grinning from ear to ear! One user even said "I love it!" I'm starting to see patterns around certain features people want to see added, like shot list integration and inline editing recommendations. Even though those weren't high on my priority list originally, I'm going to jump on that feedback to get those capabilities built out next. This is why early feedback is so critical.

I'm learning as I go that injecting Subscribr earlier into the script creation process will be essential to gaining traction. This is because people tend to see only a small window of time when they could use Subscribr today - immediately after finishing a script. They don’t particularly care to use the tool for videos that have already been released, even if just to learn something or simply to try out the tool. So here is the key takeaway. Rather than just optimizing finished scripts, I need to make Subscribr a seamless part of the writing workflow itself. I'm hopeful that by the time creators are ready to hit record, the feedback and ideas from Subscribr will have already helped shape an awesome script!

I took my foot off the gas a bit on promotion this week to focus more on development. But I need to pour fuel back on that fire because momentum can slip away so easily. I’ve only got 1 week left before the holidays pull me away from work.

By this time next week we will hopefully have crossed the 100 subscriber threshold on the newsletter. While the numbers are small, the direction of the graph sure does look encouraging. I hope I am providing some value to both friends and YouTubers. Thank you for following along, please feel free to write back with any suggestions on what you’d like to see more of.

Your friend,
Gil