

Ask HN: OK, I've started-up, now how do I continue-up? - luvcraft

At the beginning of this year I "soft launched" a video game recommendation service. I knew how to build the site and make it work, but I'm mystified by marketing (even if I had a million dollars to throw at marketing I wouldn't know where to throw it), so I applied to a bunch of incubators (including YC, of course), sure that one of them would pick up the project because recommendation services were pretty sexy last winter. Alas, they all declined, but the site kept chugging along. A few other opportunities came up that distracted me from it, but they've all either run their course or failed to pan out, so now I'm back to the game recommender. It's steadily grown to 670+ users who have contributed a total of 40,000+ ratings, but obviously that's not nearly enough users to attract a potential buy-out or partnership, or make affiliate links lucrative, or even support my clever original plan of serving ads specifically to users who the recommendation engine had determined would like each ad.<p>Meanwhile, just as I'm getting back to it, Penny Arcade has announced that they're launching a similar service. That quells my worries that "maybe there's just not a market for this", and (hopefully) the services are different enough that both could survive. Also on the bright side, the Penny Arcade announcement has given me a boost in activity from people who were reminded by the announcement that my service already existed, and presumably also from people saying "oh, that sounds neat! I wonder if there already is something like that..." and finding mine.<p>I'm sure there's a huge market for this service, and the internet is filled with video game forums that I'm sure would be interested -- the site was briefly mentioned (with a link) on the second page of an unrelated thread on NeoGAF and got over a hundred hits just from that one link. But all of those forums have a strict "no soliciting for your website" policy, and they won't even reply when I email them asking for their advertising rates. I'm gnashing my teeth walking through a market filled with millions of potential customers, but forbidden from mentioning my wares to any of them.<p>So, HN, please tell me: where do I go from here? On the one hand I think my startup is "successful" because it does what it was designed to do, and it's providing a useful service to me and a bunch of other users, but on the other hand it's growing at a glacial pace and it's not making any money.<p>Help!
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olegious
1\. make a list of all popular video game blogs and sites that cover the world
of gaming.

2\. contact the bloggers, site owners, writers, etc. on that list telling them
about the site and what a great tool it could be for their users (hype it up)-
your goal is to get mentioned on as many of them as possible. You can even ask
to guest post on some gaming blogs- something like "how i turned my gaming
passion into a startup."

3\. since you didn't include a link to your site, i don't know if you've
already done this- but make sure your site is easily sharable across all the
social networks (FB like button, Google +1 button, etc).

4\. run a contest for your existing users- offer them a giftcard to gamestop
or amazon or something, the user that brings in the most sign ups (you can
give them unique referral codes) in X time wins. For $100-200 you can have
cheap user driven marketing.

good luck

~~~
luvcraft
1 and 2 I did; I emailed all the major video game blogs and news sites with a
sort of "friendly press release" in which I pointed out the features of my
service that would make great attention-grabbing headlines and really appeal
to video game players. Only one, relatively small, game news site actually
posted about it, and they only did because a friend of mine is an editor there
and he specifically told them to.

3: There's a Facebook "like" button and a Google "+1" button on every game's
page, and there's a general "+1" button for the entire site.

4 I should look into. A few of my most well-connected users have evangelized
about the service quite a bit without any incentives (although they probably
understand that the more users and ratings are in the service the better the
recommendations will be). So I don't know how much more effective
incentivizing evangelism will be; it might be what finally cracks the big game
forums as users post their referral links there, but most of those forums
forbid referral links in the same breath that they forbid talking about your
own service. So, it might get some people banned from their favorite forums,
but it would get me a few more users in the process. :\

~~~
olegious
I think the key in #1 and #2 is to give the blogs an incentive to mention you,
if you do a simple press release, there is no incentive there- if you offer to
write a meaningful post, they'll be more likely to respond. Everyone needs
good content.

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pkamb
Sounds like a 'social' thing that will require many users to be successful.
Thus POST A LINK.

~~~
luvcraft
here you go!

<http://reccr.com>

I refrained from posting a link of mentioning the service by name in the
original post, because I didn't want it to look like a "stealth ad". But maybe
all the crap about not promoting your own services in forums has just made me
over-cautious. :)

~~~
olegious
Looking at your site (static/welcome), some more thoughts:

1\. where's the FB "Like" button? I see the Google +1 prominently displayed,
but no Like button. Make it as easy as possible for people to share your site.

2\. in my opinion there is too much text on the main page. You can remove the
majority of the text and replace it with a stronger sign up call to action as
well as some elements that demonstrate community activity- something like
"most popular games over the last week", "trending titles"- something to show
that it isn't a dead community, this would encourage sign ups.

~~~
luvcraft
OK, I've applied #1 and also cleaned up the welcome page quite a bit. Let me
know what you think!

The "what's going on now" stuff will require a little more work, and a lot
more thought because I've been consciously designing the site to let users be
as private as they want to be, which has had the unintended side effect of
making it hard for some users to be as public as they want to be.

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dchuk
spend some time getting a fresh design on that site, and show off much more of
the social activity on it. Make it look REALLY busy and active, so new users
will want to jump in and participate.

Then I'd recommend some forum marketing personally, go get active on a few
major gaming forums and use a signature link to your site. Forum marketing is
very underrated but can be very lucrative if done actively. Plus you get to
participate in forums you're already interested in (hopefully) so it barely
feels like work

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abbasmehdi
Think I can help, get in touch.

