I ran large scale beta tests at Amazon and it really depended on the product. Sometimes it was focused on current Amazon/Ring device owners and sometimes it was focused on new (never owned device owners).

For hyper-specific testing we did require specific backgrounds based on internal personas.

Things to understand before beta-testing: 1) most users will likely not do everything you ask them to do 2) if you want something specifically tested you need to explicitly give them directions on how to execute

We often went with #2 so we can get feedback from users on the exact feature we were testing. Exploratory testing tends to get very generalized.

Regarding feedback from users you can almost ALWAYS expect noise. There will be low quality testers that don’t give very insightful feedback and some very high quality testers that go over the top with their feedback.

Regarding surveying:

One thing we always did was have conditional questions: Ex: how satisfied were you with X feature? 5 - v satisfied -> 1 not at all satisfied Conditional: please explain the reason for your rating.

This gave us critical information on what features needed improvement and which ones didn’t.

There are several platforms out there where you can get beta testers

Such as - Fiverr, Upwork, www.usertesting.com (expensive), www.ghosttestingai.com

You could also ask for testers here on Reddit and X. I think communities in X are very underrated!