

Ask HN: Advice for my startup - Best use of 14,000 email addresses? - metachris

I've built a few simple multiplayer games for Android and about 14,000 players have (optionally) submitted their email with an expressed interest in hearing about new related projects. Don't know if that's a lot but I guess they might be of some value if I can put them to use. My startup now became a multiplayer engine and hosted gameserver infrastructure, with a beta version currently released for Android developers (http://www.flockengine.com).<p>How do you think I could best use those email addresses?<p>They are all from people enjoying multiplayer games on Android, therefore it could be an interesting promotion channel for Android developers using my framework. Another idea could be simply to start building an email newsletter. I would really appreciate your feedback / advice!
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hajrice
In my opinion, an email newsletter would be fantastic. Jason L Baptiste
recently wrote a great article on that(link:
[http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/email-newsletters-are-
sti...](http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/email-newsletters-are-still-a-
serious-business/)).

You could target the gamers(focusing on the gamers that play multiplayer
games) audience and have website whose target audience you're serving pay you
for ads.

I remember there was a discussion on HN mentioning this topic, someone said
that you could easily take 300 for a CPM for email newsletters.

Thus, if you do the math you have near 6k from newsletters.

Good luck! :)

~~~
mschaecher
Agreed. There have been some good articles here lately about email
newsletters. Try searchyc.com to find them. Mixergy also has some good
interviews with people running successful newsletter startups.

Could also use it as an upsell product or free value add-on for
people/companies using your game platform.

~~~
metachris
Thanks for the tips! I did find a couple of interesting submissions through
searchyc, in particular via <http://searchyc.com/submissions/newsletter> and
<http://searchyc.com/submissions/email+newsletter>

These are the mixergy interviews I've been able to find:

* How Ideal Bite (a email newsletter company) sold for $20 Mil (<http://mixergy.com/jen-boulden-ideal-bite-interview/>)

* Peter Shankman HARO: The Email Newsletter That Grosses $1+ Mil A Year (<http://mixergy.com/haro-peter-shankman/>)

~~~
AndrewWarner
Thanks for recommending my work.

Here's a direct link to the MP3 of Peter's interview: <http://bit.ly/cRejSj>

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metachris
After more thoughts it seems that building an email newsletter about Android
games might be the way to go. >10k is a good initial userbase. The newsletter
could later become a promotion channel for developers and I can include that
into the multiplayer framework package too.

Two main questions for me right now are the frequency (weekly or biweekly
maybe(?)) and the content of the newsletter. Android games related topics is
an interesting niche - and a heavily expanding one if the current growth of
Android continues. Any suggestions what I could write about? Perhaps game
reviews and what's going on in the Android game scene in general? I think
there will be a couple of interesting things coming up with C2DM [1], where
the private beta is currently starting (got an invite today - for the
multiplayer engine! :).

Maybe I could also partner with existing Android app / game / review websites.

Ideas and advices are greatly appreciated!

[1] <http://code.google.com/android/c2dm/index.html> (Google's cloud-to-device
messaging, introduced in Android 2.2)

