51–60 of 73 posts
When building http://www.CraftzBay.com the only logical way to find sellers of handmade items was through Facebook. We started chatting with them through Facebook to explain our idea and many of them signed up!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish people(hackers) would spend same amount of time building and marketing/selling their idea. Unfortunately, i think its human nature, it is always easy to start with the fun part, and give up when the steps need to be taken become uninteresting/difficult. Hackers love creating stuff, but when it comes to the selling that idea to their potential users, they dont have enough energy. Hackers vs entrepreneurs?
Possible. Its also part of the trough of sorrow. Its hard to remain motivated when nobody is paying attention to you. A lot of websites I liked using that launched at the same time I did on HN are now dead despite my asking to pay to use them. slowcop.com is one that springs to mind. I used that damn near every day and still miss it. I wonder just how much success (small and large) can be attributed to just continuin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish people(hackers) would spend same amount of time building and marketing/selling their idea. Unfortunately, i think its human nature, it is always easy to start with the fun part, and give up when the steps need to be taken become uninteresting/difficult. Hackers love creating stuff, but when it comes to the selling that idea to their potential users, they dont have enough energy. Hackers vs entrepreneurs?
I absolutely agree. I have fallen into that trap a number of times. The latest was indeed with Fork the Cookbook. Some bloggers filed a DMCA request (fun fact, recipes cannot be copyrighted, so they essentially were perjuring themselves). It sapped so much energy from our marketing and coding efforts, that 3-4 weeks later we're still recovering - took ages to convince ourselves that it was still worth doing. There's…
When building http://www.CraftzBay.com the only logical way to find sellers of handmade items was through Facebook. We started chatting with them through Facebook to explain our idea and many of them signed up!
That's awesome! Just curious, how did you go about searching for them?
About press - you need to pitch people. Start with smaller blogs and work your way up from there. Guess reporter's email addresses and try to find a way in by being helpful first.
That's how I got my first customers for http://www.artsumo.com.
More the links, more clicks, and thus you get some visitors.
Now turning that visitor into adopters is Selling part. If there is something for visitors they will use it, else not.
P.S. I am also doing such experiments for my project: http://feedbacker.51stacks.com
and blog a few things at http://blog.51stacks.com
I realize this doesn't apply to everyone, but if you can use it, it's great. Zynga is the master of this, but network effects work at all levels. Even if you don't have another product, think of what other social circles you can tap into. Chances are you talk to potential early adopters on a regular basis.
This is what we are doing at http://www.unioncy.com. We are building a platform that lets you easily catalog all your personal belongings.
The first thing to do is hypothesize/define as narrowly as possible who your early adopters will be and then start looking for where they're hanging out together online. (They will be hanging out together because early adopters are obsessives.)
Once you've found where they are you can approach them directly at that online hangout or launch a simple email marketing. (Hint: People's online handles are strongly correlated with their email addresses. Another hint: There are lots of taskrabbits who are good at finding email addresses.)
Pitch your value props and invite them to become early users.