

Startup founders reveal their #1 user acquisition tactic - maclover
http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/startup-founders-reveal-their-1-user-acquisition-tactic

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bpatrianakos
They said absolutely nothing. Blogging, make great products, and other
platitudes are pretty meaningless. I am thoroughly unimpressed.

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ezl
i think i might have said that 1 year ago. now i feel like the secret sauce is
that there is no secret sauce except working your ass off. great products and
prolific blogging are hard work, but they'll get your name out there. its that
slow linear growth that is frustrating, but tried and true.

i'll admit i still read these with the hope of some magic silver bullet that
gets rocket lease on track for exponential growth, but i haven't found it yet
and i have nothing but respect for the founders that have it in them to
relentlessly do PR and write blogs.

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bpatrianakos
Oh I absolutely agree with you. It is hard work! And they deserve respect too.
But unless this your first time reading startup advice the whole thing is just
the same old generic stuff as always. Yeah, we know blogging is important but
give us some specifics please.

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acgourley
If you make a lot of money buying users, you have very little incentive to
talk about it. For one, you admit you don't have something magic and
irreplaceable like a well known founder or well read blog. Secondly you may
give a hint to competitors about which channels or keywords of paid
acquisition are working for you.

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dclusin
I've heard secrecy thrown about quite a bit but I've always been a bit
mystified as to why. The reason I'm confused is because it seems as though any
of your well healed competitors would be able to study your
product/marketing/etc and determine what you are spending time and effort on
to acquire customers.

For instance one of the tactics mentioned in the blog is SEO/Adwords. From a
competitors standpoint it seems like it would be pretty easy to reverse
engineer where the company is devoting most of their money and effort into and
thus their user acquisition strategy.

This of course assumes the competitors are technically sophisticated. Is this
assumption really that much of an exception? Meaning, for those in business,
are your competitors really that stupid?

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acgourley
It's hard to comprehensively study what all competitors are doing. It's
probably more than most startups can afford to allocate time for, anyway.
You're right it's not impossible, but what advantage do you have making it any
easier? Some blog writing about your great user-buying tactics? That's still
not a great song to sing, when you could be saying, "our product is so great
_users just come to us_ "

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forgot_password
I can see Buffer getting a lot of traffic via their guest posting strategy.
I've seen several of their posts on HN. However, I would have a hard time
imagining that these posts convert since they cover topics totally unrelated
to their app. Also, I think their strategy it's generally dilutive for their
brand. I recognize that startup blogs are a great way to get traffic but I'm
turned off by it. Maybe I'm the only one though

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lnanek2
I've seen TriplePoint PR recommend buying something like 75k in ads on app
launch to get into the rankings, then grow organically from there. Combined
with having a bunch of reviews ready on the launch date, etc..

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stfu
Do you have any further information on that?

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herro256
totally surprised nobody mentioned PPC or display advertising. Then again,
none of the people asked in the article have mass market offers for consumers.

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brianfryer
Great point. B2B marketing can often be very different from B2C marketing.

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witoldc
For many startups, #1 tactic is to spam the hell out of the social network of
your existing users.

The links is laughably bad. It's just a bunch of advertising disguised as an
informative post.

