1. Stick the mailing list sign-up form on a landing page and do a bit of promoting in relevant places. Specifically say it's for beta announcements, preview rel

1. Stick the mailing list sign-up form on a landing page and do a bit of promoting in relevant places. Specifically say it's for beta announcements, preview release testing and picking everyone's brain. This should net you some users to bootstrap the process with, and they will be responsive. 2. Release the beta, mark it as such and ask people for feedback after they used the product for a bit. Listen to the feedback, act on what's relevant, keep improving the beta. Give kudos where they are due. Have public forum, actively participate in all threads. Many people look at how active the support forum is before trying the goods or leaving any feedback. So the more active it is, the better. Also, moderate it aggressively to trim junk and trivialities. 3. Once out of the beta, don't forget to genereously reward everyone who chipped in. Ideally with a special gift, like a specially tagged lifetime premium account, a handful of most expensive licenses, etc. The worst thing to do is to offer a discount on a production version - this comes across as a cheap and greedy move.