Moatt found 35 product bugs before launch, for $700

Moatt ran a pre-launch testing task on Pond: 245 people registered, 99 submitted proof-backed tests, and 35 verified reports were rewarded.

📈 245 people registered in one week. 99 submitted proof-backed product tests, and Moatt paid for the 35 reports that actually passed verification

Moatt Bounty on Pond

Launch day is an EXPENSIVE time to discover a broken onboarding flow

Every visitor may have come from paid acquisition, founder outreach, a partner, or months of audience building. If the product fails during their first session, most users leave without explaining what happened.

Moatt wanted to identify those problems before launch traffic arrived. The company ran a pre-launch testing bounty through Pond

The total payout was $700

It produced 35 verified reports backed by real product usage and screenshots

Product being tested

Moatt provides companies with an AI growth team. Its always-on agents run SEO, search visibility, advertising, and competitor research on a schedule

Users need to connect a real company, complete onboarding, and run a growth task before they experience the product's value

That made the first session critical

Confusing instructions, inaccurate outputs, or a failed step could prevent users from reaching the moment that makes the product useful

Moatt used the bounty to test the complete journey before opening it to customers.

Bounty brief

Moatt allocated a $1,000 reward pool across 50 available slots. Each accepted contributor could earn $20

To qualify, contributors had to:

Register using a real company or domain
Complete the full onboarding process
Spend at least 15 minutes running a real growth task
Capture screenshots of errors, confusion, friction, and unexpected results
Submit specific written feedback based on their experience

A signup alone did not qualify for payment. Each submission needed evidence from actual product usage

The results after 1 week

The bounty attracted 245 registrations

From those registrations:

99 people completed the test and submitted proof
35 reports passed verification
Each accepted submission received $20
Moatt distributed $700 in total

The unused portion of the reward pool stayed with Moatt.

The company paid for accepted findings rather than every registration or incomplete attempt.

Why the reports were useful?

General feedback creates more work for a product team

A comment such as 'SEO audit seems inaccurate' gives the team little information to investigate

A useful report identifies the audit that was run, the result that looked wrong, the page involved, and the evidence supporting the claim

The bounty requirements pushed contributors toward that level of detail

Each accepted report gave Moatt:

Context from a real company or domain
A completed onboarding journey
Evidence from a genuine growth task
Screenshots of the issue
Written feedback the team could review and reproduce

The team could turn those findings into product and engineering tasks before customers encountered the same problems

Cost comparison

A structured pre-launch QA round through an agency can cost between $3,000 and $5,000. Recruiting testers and coordinating the process can also delay when the first reports arrive. For user testing, we compared seven UserTesting alternatives on what each one publishes.

Moatt's total payout was $700.

That represents:

$2,300 less than a $3,000 testing round
$4,300 less than a $5,000 testing round
$20 paid for each verified submission
35 launch issues documented before customer traffic arrived

The remaining budget could stay focused on product development, launch distribution, and customer acquisition.

Pond handled the operational work

Running a testing program usually requires someone to recruit participants, track submissions, review evidence, manage payments, and follow up with contributors.

Pond handled registration, submission tracking, proof verification, and payouts to Pond Wallets.

Moatt defined the task, reward, and evidence requirements. Contributors completed the product workflow and submitted their findings through the bounty.

This allowed the founding team to stay focused on reviewing useful reports and fixing the issues that could affect launch.

Strongest contributors 🏃‍♂️

Some submissions revealed issues and product insights worth exploring in greater depth

Contributors who surfaced critical problems or unusually sharp feedback could be invited to paid follow-up calls with Moatt's founding team

Those conversations started with useful context

The contributor had already used the product, completed a real task, and documented a specific issue

Bounty helped Moatt find bugs and identify potential research participants at the same time.

Deadline is customer traffic

Once a product launches, every preventable issue becomes more EXPENSIVE

The team may need to fix the product while handling support requests, protecting early customer relationships, and trying to understand weak activation data

Early users also have little reason to document everything that went wrong. Many simply close the tab.

Moatt collected those findings while there was still time to act on them.

One week brought in 245 registrations, 99 proof-backed product tests, and 35 verified reports for $700.

Run this before your own launch

Pond gives founders access to a network of more than 10,000 contributors who can test onboarding flows, websites, mobile apps, AI outputs, product features, and other launch-critical experiences.