41–50 of 157 posts
In essence: Go where your users hang out. With few exceptions, this is probably NOT the same place as where startup geeks hang out.
One example: my startup has a website for the Energy & Utilities industry. We got a bunch of early users by forming a partnership with a trade organization for energy providers.
Another key thing is to understand the community. There is radical cultural diversity between subreddits which manifests in very different reactions to self-promotion. It's essential to engage appropriately and respectfully.
Something I've used for other projects is searching for coverage of competitors in the same space, then pitching to people who have already featured them. Again, very important to hand-tailor each pitch and offer value to the person you're contacting.
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This is borderline to SPAM, so I think the e-mails should be very personal. If you have many competitors I am probably getting lot's of these e-mails which means you would have much harder time to get my attention. Let's say you are a hosting provider, I probably would not like to get an e-mail from you offering me some good price or hard to understand feature of yours, because there are probably lot's of cheap hosti…
But if you noticed that, let's say I have 350ms response time in Asia when it's only 50 in USA and you have some solution for it, I probably will reply you even if I am not going to buy your service right away. That reminds me of a technique I used when doing freelance Web design. I focused on restaurants with bad websites. I wrote a crawler that searched for restaurants with email addresses on the site, but bad html…
I haven't done any promotion for http://asoftmurmur.com besides posting to reddit and HN, and it now has 400-500 regular daily users. It depends entirely on what type of product or service you're offering. Another key thing is to understand the community. There is radical cultural diversity between subreddits which manifests in very different reactions to self-promotion. It's essential to engage appropriately and res…
Here's a tactic that has worked for me so far 1. Set up a blog on your domain 2. write 20+ articles on industry-related topics (this alone will bring in some traffic) 3. get a number of emails from prospective customers 4. write a PERSONALIZED email to everyone on the list and ask if they are interested in an interview to be published on your blog. Offer a link from your blog as additional incentive My response rate…
I haven't done any promotion for http://asoftmurmur.com besides posting to reddit and HN, and it now has 400-500 regular daily users. It depends entirely on what type of product or service you're offering. Another key thing is to understand the community. There is radical cultural diversity between subreddits which manifests in very different reactions to self-promotion. It's essential to engage appropriately and res…
For the life of me, though, I haven't been able to remember the name the last couple time's I've wanted it (and my bookmarks are horrendously disorganized at the moment), and googling different iterations of "white noise generator sliders people birds rain" didn't yield success. I need to stash this away somewhere I won't lose it...
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This is borderline to SPAM, so I think the e-mails should be very personal. If you have many competitors I am probably getting lot's of these e-mails which means you would have much harder time to get my attention. Let's say you are a hosting provider, I probably would not like to get an e-mail from you offering me some good price or hard to understand feature of yours, because there are probably lot's of cheap hosti…
Yeah, to me some evidence that the person has attempted to understand what I do and why this product would actually help me (considered honestly) is what distinguishes interesting contacts from spam. I'm in academia rather than industry, but I think some at least vaguely similar principles apply. I get some cold emails that, while slightly disguised, boil down to: "a paper you wrote came up in a Google scholar search…
I haven't done any promotion for http://asoftmurmur.com besides posting to reddit and HN, and it now has 400-500 regular daily users. It depends entirely on what type of product or service you're offering. Another key thing is to understand the community. There is radical cultural diversity between subreddits which manifests in very different reactions to self-promotion. It's essential to engage appropriately and res…
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Me too. I tried hard here, but I dare not to attaché the URL with every post. I got 0 conversations too, even though part of my target users/customers are here.
Putting your URL at the bottom of every comment is actually against the HN guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html But yeah, I would think few startups would find the HN community a bullseye.
Here's a tactic that has worked for me so far 1. Set up a blog on your domain 2. write 20+ articles on industry-related topics (this alone will bring in some traffic) 3. get a number of emails from prospective customers 4. write a PERSONALIZED email to everyone on the list and ask if they are interested in an interview to be published on your blog. Offer a link from your blog as additional incentive My response rate…
When you write the articles, do you SEO on questions that people may ask in their searches or just write general articles not necessarily pushing your product?