influencers make horrible reviewers because an honest bad review will deter other companies from approaching you. its like joe namath hawking reverse mortgages, he’ll say anything if you pay him enough. its rediculous
Power User Page Gone?
1 Like
Money rules the world!
Honesty dies everywhere.
It’s interesting to see that money arose independently in disparate cultures after they got isolated. That means the idea could not be stopped.
Without money the creators of items you wanted you would meet personally and negotiate. That meant farmers were “rich”. What money did was let the middlemen take the profit, haggle across multiple farmers and so the farmers got poor.
Also money dehumanises. Most people would never be cruel or harm another human they encounter - the species is social, requires empathy we are wired with. But money you allow bad things to happen to a creator without you being aware. i.e. Money is the root of all evil.
The nearest you can get back to not making money evil is to source local buy local, so at least if you are harmful it’s your neighbourhood where you are more likely to know the consequences of your actions. So a village culture of consumers of local product.
The rich middlemen however invented Television and Internet through which they distracted us all with the most polarised topics - find a topic half the population agree with.
Hence now Twitter, Fox news, etc
Turn all the gadgets off and go walk locally and chat to people.
If you guys love to do real beta testing (receive articles prior to release to test them, you should check Betabound page).
I did, but they wanted to know too many private things.
Though I have not to hide something :
But who will give such special information to a unknown “company”
Of course I could have told them some wrong information, but that’s not me acting this way.
That is exactly how Anker/Soundcore does it as well. Participants are selected and sent items that have not been released to the general public to test and report back on any/all issues or positive notes.
Have you been selected to test anything there?
1 Like
It’s a bit of a grind, but I’ve gotten one hit out of about a dozen applications on Betabound. Most of the time I don’t hear back or get rejection emails. Betabound itself is legit (they are owned by Centercode, a beta testing platform that lots of companies use), but will also have third party betas on it that link to somewhere off site. So, you have to be comfortable giving a little bit of personal information to random Google forms or SurveyMonkey surveys.
It’s pretty low yield and not the most productive use of time, but if I’d otherwise be scrolling through FB or something I’ll rip through Betabound for a few minutes and see if anything catches my eye. Betabound itself doesn’t seem to see much action, new tests don’t come out real often and are probably pounced pretty quickly when they do.
I signed up on their website and even spent an hour filling out some information regarding the stuff I own and the likes, well I remember getting emails about their testing opportunities and I’d click on it and explain why I would be a good candidate but I never got selected. After a while I gave up and unsubscribed
2 Likes
That’s my experience most of the time as well. I’m sure most of the tests (especially hardware tests) are enormously popular and they get more applicants than they could possibly every need.
I’ve had better luck with individual company’s Centercode platforms, but it’s never a 100% thing and can still spend considerable time on the application only to get rejected. I had a few tests that were for an item that I am an enthusiast and considerable technical resource on other forums for, made that clear in the “tell us about yourself” section, and still got denied.
You’ll also spend a bit of time researching where to find the various Centercode sites. Some are buried on the company’s domain, some are subdomains on Centercode’s site, etc. There are also sometimes “keys” to apply to tests that aren’t shown to every member of a particular Centercode site, these tend to be buried in user communities related to the brands and are harder to find.
1 Like
Power user was really more active when your allow to do reviews on Amazon but some say it’s bias since you get it for free. But after the crack down from Amazon Anker moved towards social media like youtube and how many followers. It’s understandable but yeah it is what it is now.
1 Like
1 out of 12 is actually not too bad of a hit rate. I only apply for hardware betas in general, and assume it will be less than 1 out of 10. But over time that adds up.
And it doesn’t take long to do the applications once you have done a few. Most of the information is the same, and I have some standard relevant answers saved in a note I can reference as needed.
Some of the tests the target audience is VERY specific and the applicant pool is huge. On the other side, at certain sites I recognize testers from years of overlapping betas at this point.
1 Like
I think they make the mistake of quantity over diversity in their testers.
There’s often very simple bugs in released products which implies they had testers not do much beyond an unboxing (or they ignored the tester feedback).
This undermines the pre-order risk, they are asking for folks, before reviews exist, to buy the Soundcore Frames. If you look at their last product - Liberty 3 Pro - there are very basic bugs in the released product. Given you’d expect a 20%+ discount after month+ , why pay to be a guinea pig?
Can’t skimp on testing and ask for pre-order, and when you do see reviews often it’s not with all the features tested which are the very reason you’d buy the new product vs the predecessor.
So for audio product, they need some diverse Android and iphone and Windows and Mac and IOS device owners and get all combinations to be tested so basic, try with ANC, try with Ambient, etc. The number of combinations is indeed significant which is why diversity of testers required, not just very similar people doing nearly identical testing.
2 Likes
Well I’ve given up so I’ll stick to Anker’s Testing Events whenever they decide to do them again lol.
What did you get to test from Betabound?
Are you allowed to talk about it?
1 Like
There is a distinct differences between Anker’s Power Users system and beta tests that I’ve participated in for other companies:
Most betas (I think Apple’s iOS beta is the only exception I’ve experienced) require you to sign an NDA. They absolutely do not want you talking about the product. This is sort of the opposite of the Power Users program, the requirements for which seem to be based on how many people the selected tester can tell about the product.
It’s pretty clear why they want the NDA from my testing experience in other platforms. The product is unreleased and may or may not be released, or may have significant hardware or software changes based on what is found in the testing.
They likely would not want you to review the product if it is truly in beta, as they can be pretty rough at times or not have all of the features built right away. If I were reviewing a wireless router and my review mentioned “SSID stops broadcasting after 12 hours of uptime and device would require a restart to get it back”, that would turn lots of people away from the new product. I had another device where the first beta was 2 months with a stripped down feature set and an “end of beta” survey, a few month break, and then another month of using new firmware with more features added. Stuff like that is the reality of beta testing. You need some tolerance for things not quite working and needing to be dialed in.
Beta testing is fun, but it is also a bit of work. Premature hardware failure (and return shipping for post-mortem inspection if this happens), taking steps to try to narrow down how to reproduce an issue, duplicating it and grabbing logs, working with the product team or developers directly to get a fix and test the fix, short firmware cadences that include fixes from other testers and requests to see if you can reproduce a similar issue, etc.
Compared to this, the Power User program seems more geared towards marketing, not truly beta testing.
1 Like
Most of it is still under NDA so I can’t give any specifics. From BetaBound specifically it’s only been some smarthome type stuff. But from finding various CenterCode sites I’ve done quite a bit of networking equipment.
1 Like
Oh nice 
I’m gonna have to check Centercode
Since this has blown up with comments:
Anker, if you are reading, I obviously am a good conversation starter and would love to influence others with testing products lol. 
Seriously though, thanks for all the info everyone!
1 Like
Sure, that’s why I’m talking about them. I can’t give a lot of information per NDA, but I have tested high-end earphones, vacuum robots, soundbars, and a lot of networking devices (routers, extenders…).
Obviously they ask you for some info, as they look for some certain demographic profile.
The good thing (besides of the fun of testing something that has not reached the market yet) is that sometimes (and if you do your “homework”) you can keep the devices once the beta test is over.
Oh that’s pretty cool! Maybe I should give Betabound another try lol