

Ask HN: What is the best way to introduce your startup to the world? - kdforf

I&#x27;m about to launch my new startup but I&#x27;m not sure how to promote it. I know that HackerNews is a great community to introduce it but regularly no one pays attention to a new user posts. Social media is good too but not for those who don&#x27;t have enough friends on the web or their friends are not their audience. For example I&#x27;m launching an English startup but mostly my friends do not understand English.
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ghc
One lesson I've learned over the years: You can keep launching until someone
notices, but if you have to "launch" in the first place, that's the business
equivalent of a code smell.

Once you accept that you will not get coverage on any of the major sites, you
can think about how to promote your product. You should have already started
before you built anything, to make sure your product solves someone's problem.
If it solves even one person's problem well, chances are they will know other
people who have the same problem and will be your biggest advocate / promotion
avenue.

For promotion, sometimes the old tricks are the best tricks. Yes, ads cost
money, but $100 spent on AdSense can still send a lot of people to your site
if you spend it wisely.

So don't worry about launching, worry about minimizing your customer
acquisition cost. And start by simply advertising so you have an initial cost
of acquisition for your estimates.

~~~
robodale
This.

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MojoJolo
Our startup is an automatic summarization API
([http://www.textteaser.com/](http://www.textteaser.com/)). I once wrote an
article in Medium ([https://medium.com/medium-
ideas/59b1747c1d36](https://medium.com/medium-ideas/59b1747c1d36)) to showcase
how our technology will perform with Medium articles. It received good
feedback. Frontpage in Hacker News plus top post in Medium for last month. We
then create a bot in Reddit
([http://www.reddit.com/user/tldrrr?sort=top](http://www.reddit.com/user/tldrrr?sort=top))
to summarize submitted articles. Mostly good feedback but some subreddits
banned the bot eventually.

So my tip is, don't just show the world your product. Show the world what your
product can do.

It is best if you can show your product to where people are familiar with. In
my case I used Medium, and Reddit. I'm planning to do it to some popular web
applications next time.

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apphrase
Unfortunately we are still in beta, but this is exactly the problem we are
tackling. Hopefully within a couple of months we will be helping you or
similar people. In the meantime, I agree about the good comment below about
advertising. And also you should be pushing it to friends and family first.
Although a language barrier seems to be an obstacle, I am sure you can find at
least a couple of friends to use/recommend your app. We think of it as a tree,
first branching is hard but possible, the rest is just growing the tree.
Advertising as well as active participation is key here. Needless to say, good
quality product/service is essential too. All the best with your endeavour

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mw67
It depends entirely on the type of business you are building. There is no one
fits all answer. Give us more background, otherwise you should read PG's memos
or answers on Quora.

~~~
kdforf
I'm working on a Google Reader alternative which in my opinion is a lot more
useful! It gathers the news from across the web based on the user's interests
and summarizes them like summly. Also it comes with a system to save the posts
to read them later and let's users to add their own feeds and lets the users
to turn the posts summarizing on or off for specific feeds.

~~~
mw67
This looks really cool and I actually need something like this. I would target
busy people who don't have time to read full articles, and I would use a
mobile platform to distribute this (iPhone/Android apps). Try also students
that needs to summarise long text for school, this should help them. And blog
writters should put a preview/summary of the article on top of it so send it
to them as well, with an example of their article summarised in your emails.

