amanaplanablog

Quora is just plain strange. I used to use a sock puppet account on Quora to answer questions and "promote" my personal business (I know, not a great strategy but it worked quite well).

One day I decided to create a Quora account with my real name as the founder of my company. I then answered questions will full transparency and full disclosure when mentioning my company/product.

My real account was banned and answers deleted. My sock puppet account still thrives.

Go / HTML / CSS / Vanilla JS / Postgres

I've always had a ploy I used to avoid this to a degree. When joining a company you have to fill out "prior inventions". I generally list a number of names and general vague descriptions. The catch is, none of them exist they are simply invented in my head.

When building a side project I use one of the names from my prior inventions list.

Seems a bit overly simplistic and not realistic. Most real life data wouldn't be ASCII based. I deal with a lot of large CSVs and do a lot of processing (multi-terabyte CSVs). Null bytes, invalid unicode, all kinds of issues are very common in real world data. Not to mention improperly formatted CSVs (not closing quotes, etc).

Don't think of them as "beta testers". They are users. Slapping beta in front makes it sound like you lack any confidence in what you're doing. 1:1 outreach is great advice. Think of it as finding users, hopefully users that are not afraid to give you feedback.