
Getting A New Product Off The Ground: Part One - aaw
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/11/04/getting-a-new-product-off-the-ground-part-one/
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patio11
Hmm. I'm sort of considering blogging on a fairly frequent basis this month,
so while I appreciate to no end that folks find my blog interesting, can I ask
that anyone considering submitting this series in the future exercise
discretion? I would dislike being on the front page twice a week.

That said, if folks have any questions, shoot.

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iampims

        In particular, I’m starting to devote my free cycles at lunch into thinking
        about scalable content generation strategies for organic SEO, which is the
        form of marketing that I’ve had the best results with in the past.
    

For situations where organic SEO is not really an option (or for which I lack
imagination), what other strategies would you recommend to get an app from 10
uniques/day to a hundred or so? I’d especially be interested in your opinion
on how to attract visitors to a site like delicious/reddit/digg.

Thanks!

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patio11
Seed it with your friends, act as sockpuppets for a while, and engage with
whatever community latches on. It's funny, you guys envy my ability to spin up
thousands of pages and sell stuff, and I envy the whole viral loop dynamic.

Also, everybody who is not in walled garden, and most of those who are, can
and should have an organic SEO strategy. It's insanely powerful, and has very
attractive characteristics for startups in that it rewards technical savvy,
close interaction with your community, and agility in execution, and does not
necessarily require a whole lot of money to do.

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petervandijck
"Happiness does not write code" is an awesome quote.

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enan
Patrick, what service are you planning to use for billing (presumably
recurring)?

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patio11
Spreedly + Paypal.

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tomjen3
I noticed you use Paypal for bingocardcreator.com too - aren't you concerned
they will kill your account? They seem to do so a lot.

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patio11
I think this is a cognitive bias caused by, e.g., me not rushing to the front
page fifty times in the last four years saying "Guys WTF Paypal just paid me a
thousand dollars on time with no hassles."

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fookyong
I hope you won't mind me lifting that line and repeating it as my own in the
future with no attribution ;) It spells out exactly what I want to say every
time I hear the "WTF PayPal suxx" debate.

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patio11
Go for it. I've got lots more.

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revoltingx
Nothing beats a solid TODO list. I keep mine in a file called TODO.txt with
sketches on my grid notepad. (Makes designing html pages much easier.)

When you have a solid framework (I use Perl + CGI::App) the CRUD code/modules
become the easiest to code.

It's the damn interface that takes a good while (especially without a good
designer.)

What I like to do is use Blueprint CSS and make my pages jQuery themeable.
This gives me good fonts and padding along with a standard look when working
with the jQuery UI plugins.

I can't even fathom the idea of starting a business, there is so much to do
when creating a decent app that adding the business part just adds to the
headache.

Another hurdle I've come across is documentation. Even writing a good
description for your app can be hard.

I envy products that take only a couple of months and are able to turn a
profit. I've been working on my project for over a year now and just barely
getting close to a release month.

