Andy on Finding Our First Beta Teams

Back in early 2021 I kept feature ideas in a notebook that smelt of espresso and optimism. Timeforce wasn’t even a name yet, just a scribble about helping people escape spreadsheet purgatory. When I cold-emailed our first freelance studio, I honestly didn’t expect so much as a polite no.

Coffee Chats Turned Check-Ins

The trick ended up being honest curiosity. I asked how they tracked billable versus admin hours, and they laughed because the answer was “a messy Google Sheet my cousin made”. We hopped on a call, I demoed a wobbly timer, and suddenly we were sketching out a beta plan on the back of a receipt.

To keep momentum, I queued weekly coffee chats. Nothing glamorous:

• Twenty-minute check-ins every Friday
• Screenshots of whatever glow-up we’d managed that week
• One question about where the numbers felt off

Half the time we shipped hotfixes during the call. Chaotic, yes, but it made trust stick.

What I’d Repeat

If you’re courting early adopters, start by over-communicating. Note every friction point, even the daft ones. The studio muttered “we keep forgetting to stop timers” and that throwaway comment became our auto-stop experiment.

That beta crew never paid us a penny, yet they kept cheerleading. They saw their feedback land in production sometimes the same day, and it made them feel like co-founders. Honestly, that scrappy energy still lives in Timeforce today.

Stay scrappy, stay caffeinated, and don’t panic when the first version looks a bit rough. It only needs to feel like ours.