
Ask HN: Identifying target market before you have a market - coryl
Hi guys, was wondering if any of you had any insight on how to look at this. My startup is basically a service that lets you share links by creating a link blog.<p>We're starting to promote, and I started wondering: well, what kind of people do I target to use this? Bloggers? People who use competing/overlapping services? Even if I wanted to try and lure Digg'ers for example, I'm troubled because I don't know what kind of people they are, or have to find them specifically enough.<p>It lead me to wonder how services like Twitter, Digg, and Reddit promoted early. They really didn't have anybody specific to target, so how did they get people to try their services? At the earliest stage when you have no users and nobody knows your product. How, and who, do you get the word out to?<p>Thanks
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inerte
It seems you have three questions, how do you find who your costumers might
be, how do you reach them, and what do you say to them.

Keep this separated as it makes easier to research :)

I'm going to suggest something for your first question, which is your
submission title. How do you identify your potential market? The simplest way
is to think what problems you are solving, and then come up with people who
have this problem, and preferably who would pay money to avoid it.

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minalecs
one suggestion is to use some sort of ad platform, for your service I would
just suggest reddit, google and bing.. try to cheaply target certain niches,
with customized ads. That way if you see out of the many campaigns you will be
creating you can see what gets traction based on location, demographics.. etc.

