Ask HN: What is the best way to promote your startup?

The only thing that makes a startup into a business is customers.

Finding out who those customers are, what they are looking for, and then building it is the correct step.

If you haven't already had this conversation with at least 5-10 customers who are dying for exactly what you're doing, I suggest you stop what you're doing and learn some about the lean methedology.

Basically, hiding behind a keyboard thinking you're creating value isn't creating a valuable startup or product.

When you have confirmed what people want, and you build it, you have your first customers. You know how to reach these people because you know who they are, what they do, how they surf, where they hang out, and lots more.

This is really going to boil down to whether you can put down the code and learn something you aren't familiar with instead of doing busy work coding.

A book like Ash Maurya's Running Lean might be an interesting read for you.

0.02

"I want to change how you X. I do so with Y. You can do it at my service, Z." I'm not amazing at it, but if you want to trade an email or two, I'll glady trade what I leaned doing SEO work with you.

1. Hire a writer from elance to write a human-interest story about your startup. You can get this done for $100-$300.

2. Armed with #1, hit up your local news media. This kind of coverage is easiest to get and builds the social proof that you can use to build on your media coverage with the bigger outlets like nytimes, TC, etc.

3. Reach out to the main bloggers in your space and start building relationships. You are much better off spending 3-6 months building a relationship and then hitting up for coverage.

4. As you are doing the above, build and optimize your site's funnel to convert the visitors into users.

5. Obviously have presence on twitter, facebook, linkedin, wikipedia, etc. Why? Because every journalist will google you and the various social media profiles are the first things to pop up on google.

6. Google analytics is your best friend. Measure everything. The stats will also give you motivation to keep on keeping on.

7. During this entire cycle, keep brainstorming ways to develop new human interest stories that you can use to generate new publicity.

Something I see neglected in the comments is emails. I assume you had a life before you started this venture and have met people in business and personal situations and emailed back and forth with them.

Your personal email list is one of the best ways to drive initial traffic and build awareness since:

1. These people know you and (hopefully) trust you 2. They're likely more willing to provide additional connections and introductions

When you have a rough estimate of when you want to launch your startup you should be emailing the relevant contacts on your list regularly to keep them up to date on what you're doing and when it will likely be ready. That way when you launch and are trying to drive traffic you already have an initial audience who can forward it on to their contacts.

Past that... yes you should definitely emailing relevant writers with your story, blogging, and generally creating as much great content as possible and seeding it online in the places that matter to your startup.