
Ask HN: How do you promote your web apps? - samrat
What kind of promotion methods do you use to promote your newly released web apps?
======
acangiano
There are essentially four categories of promotion you need to do:

1) Inbound marketing. Have a solid blog and social media plan in place, which
doesn't ignore SEO and link building. (My upcoming book for The Pragmatic
Bookshelf is exactly for people in your position:
<http://technicalblogging.com>. Sorry for the plug, but hey, we are talking
about promotion :)

2) Hustling. Get in touch with as many bloggers and mailing list owners in
your niche as possible, offer to guest blog, reach out to journalists with a
compelling story, and so on. Do the heavy work so that all they have to do is
say YES. This is at the core of hustling.

3) Paid advertising. Online and offline advertisement can be amazing tools to
grow your business. You need to be careful though, and optimize your campaigns
or it's very easy to bleed money.

4) Affiliates and rewarded referrals. Give an incentive to those who want to
promote your app. You can give monetary compensation to your affiliates or
provide some perks to your users (e.g., free premium account for you when you
refer someone who buys a premium subscription).

~~~
nubela
I keep reading SEO, SEO, and more SEO. But what does that really entails? As a
web developer, I thought that doing nothing (other than providing quality
content) and not trying to skew search results is the best path to go?

~~~
acangiano
When we talk about SEO, we are really talking about two different efforts, on-
page SEO and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO is all about ensuring that your content can be fairly evaluated by
search engines and humans. For example, changing the permalink structure of
your posts from /?p=13 to /understanding-dependency-injection is not gaming
the system; it's helping Google (and humans) figure out what your content is
really about.

Off-page SEO is what you do outside of your pages to help Google and humans
discover your content, as well as providing Google with positive indicators of
the importance and relevance of your content. This is what most developers
object to.

Consider this. If you have a wonderful article on a blog that you never
promote and without an existing audience, your chances of being linked to are
slim. Google's ranking algorithm will unfairly think that your content is not
that great given that nobody is linking to it.

Your off-page SEO efforts are meant to promote your content, getting people to
see it, and obtaining backlinks in legitimate ways. Submitting a quality
article to HN, for example, provides value to this community and it's good
from a SEO standpoint.

Contrary to popular belief, white hat SEO is good for the web and crucial for
the promotion of your app or products.

~~~
mattmanser
The reason we object to it is that in reality it's spam. 99% of the time it's
not a great article, it's crap. You're not writing it out of joy, it's to get
links and make a computer deep in google think it's relevant. You need to
trick google into thinking people like it so you spam wherever you can and
pray you get those links.

There aren't 100 great links per day on HN. It's actually extremely difficult
to write good content. Yet there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of
thousands of companies doing this.

All off-page SEO is grey as you're essentially trying to trick google into
thinking your content is better than organic content. But is there any organic
content any more?

On the other hand, we have to get off our high horse. Real life is full of
spam, TV adverts, radio adverts, billboards, networking events where you have
to filter the schmoozers from the interesting.

The web is the same way and if you don't compete to get your content out
there, you competitor will. As everyone does it now, you have to do it too.

So I agree with you, but I'm more realistic about the fact that most content
produced is going to suck.

~~~
danmaz74
There is at leas one SEO element that you can do without compromising your
ethics: Study which the most searched keywords are in your niche, and use
those keywords in what you would have published anyway (home page, blog posts,
press releases, whatever).

This is not just SEO, it is adopting the language of your users, which is good
in itself.

------
duck
I think it comes down to _persistence_. The methods you use will vary over
time and depending on your app, but the key is to keep trying things and
learning from each one.

When I launched Hacker Newsletter (<http://www.hackernewsletter.com>) I was
thinking I would get 1000+ sign-ups the first month. It was more like 100, but
what I did do was keep publishing it each week and over time I kept trying
things, making connections, and proving it was something serious. Now I'm
approaching 6000 subscribers and growing each week.

~~~
tsycho
I love HNL. How do you monetize it? Or is it a do-good-and-earn-long-term-
karma thing?

------
DanielBMarkham
I've reached the point where I don't distinguish between programming and
writing -- to me they are both people being creative and trying to create
scalable things people want.

I do a lot of micro-projects. Sometimes the projects are web apps. Sometimes
the projects are simply essays. Lately I've been mixing them up some -- so,
for instance, something like a social site for people interested in X, with a
freemium model for an app that helps a lot with X.

So my advice is to not think of your webapp as simply a hunk of code that you
are trying to get out to people. Instead, think of yourself as on a mission to
care about/promote/help fix X, then mix and match various formats to reach out
to people who might be interested. As part of reaching out and emotionally
engaging with people, you'll promote and sell your webapp. My opinion, for
what it's worth.

------
acabal
Bloggers in your target market are priceless.

When I launched <http://www.scribophile.com/>, a site for writers, I made a
list of 50 writing blogs. They didn't have to be big names; writers love to
write so there's lots of writers' blogs out there. I sent them a friendly and
business-speak-free invitation to try the site with a free premium upgrade.
Not everyone took me up on it, but a subset of those who did ended up
participating and blogging about the site. A few years later and I still get
traffic from some of those blog posts. I also still continue reaching out to
bloggers, but now offering a month's ad slot if they're interested in writing
about us. Now that the site has significant traffic, it's a great incentive
for them.

Make sure to reach out to people with a carrot of some sort--give them an
extra reason to want to write about you. You'll never get a 100% success rate,
but even a 10% success rate will be worth it.

------
swalberg
<http://SmallPayroll.ca> was a one-man-in-his-spare-time project until
recently. What I did was:

1\. SEM - Google AdWords mostly. I spent a fair time on this, partially
because my day job at the time was in the SEM field

2\. Organic - I got a great domain that contained my primary keywords, got a
landing page built, and it ended up driving a lot of organic traffic. I also
set up a blog on the main site. The blog was good for traffic, but not that
great for conversions.

3\. Referrals - my app is mostly used by people that hire domestic help, so I
tried talking to the agencies that help people find that help. Hard to measure
that one.

4\. Provide awesome customer service - I have been told by several of my
customers that they have sent their friends.

5\. Free trial - The app gives a 30 day free trial. Many customers have
thanked me for that.

~~~
cheez
Your app is so depressing.

~~~
sixtofour
Your comment made me click on the app. :)

I thought it was attractive, and fills a need. Nothing depressing that I can
see.

------
markkat
I think it's funny that this is so high on the front page, yet there are no
comments yet. Seems everyone is hoping to find the magic bullet.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a one-size-fits all solution. You might
cover a college campus in stickers, pair up with a local organization to use
you app at a function, visit businesses and pitch it, hound tech bloggers,
etc.

Do you have a web app? If you do, this would have been a nice opportunity.
Tell us what it is, and ask for advice on how you might promote this specific
kind of web app.

------
aculver
Hi. When we first released <http://limelightapp.com/> the only thing we did
was post it on Hacker News. It made the first page for a few hours. In
addition to generating really great feedback from the community, it also
generated a decent amount of traffic (about 6000 unique visitors.) Later that
day, our app got picked up on <http://www.thenextweb.com/> and a few Chinese
sites. The article on TNW generated about 200 tweets. Within about a week or
two we had enough paid subscribers to cover all our recurring expenses.
Everything since then has been profit.

Since then we've started a blog and we've got some of the other promotional
ideas in the works as well. But at least initially I think we really benefited
not just from the discussion on HN, but the traffic. There is a large overlap
between the community here and our product's target audience.

~~~
onwardly
Just FYI, TripLingo has been featured on Mashable, TNW, RWW, etc., and each of
those posts generated between 200-1k tweets. Problem is, most of them are just
bots that auto-tweet stuff from those sites. Probably got 10-15 legit tweets
off of each. But be wary of tweets off of sites like that, I doubt anyone
legit follows the people auto-tweeting.

Which isn't to say we didn't see a lot of traffic from those articles, just
not from Twitter.

~~~
aculver
Yup. You're absolutely right. I should have qualified that. We had about the
same number of "real" tweets out of the 200.

------
redguava
Hopefully you had a pre-launch page where you collected email addresses, then
you can email these people upon launch.

Facebook or Google cpc ads.

Submit your site to business/product directories.

Post about your web app on relevant forums (ie. if it is an app to help
accountants, find some accountant forums to post on).

Join linkedIn groups and post about your app in there.

Create a facebook page/twitter and post updates regularly. Include these on
your webpage, in your email signature and try to get as many likes/followers
as you can.

Cold call/Cold email anyone you can find that are potential customers.

~~~
white_devil
_Hopefully you had a pre-launch page where you collected email addresses, then
you can email these people upon launch._

Typically this is a pre- _development_ page, whereby you're basically tricking
people into thinking you already have something, just to gauge the viability
of what you're _thinking_ of building.

In other words, it's a sleazy practise.

~~~
redguava
It doesn't have to be pre-development. For my product, I created this page
about 3 months after development began, and 3 months before public release. I
used the signups to get beta testers before launch, and then announced to the
rest after launch.

Anything can be a sleazy practice if people use it for sleazy purposes, but
it's not the practice itself.

~~~
white_devil
That's good. I did say "typically", though, and didn't accuse you of anything.
But I've seen people recommend doing what I described.

------
einaregilsson
For <http://www.hearts-cardgame.com/> I wait until you are into your second
game and then I slide down a little, uh, top banner (what are those things
called?) which has the text

"Hi there! Looks like you're enjoying the game. That's great! We'd love it if
you could help us out by sharing it with your friends:"

And then has the usual facebook/twitter/etc buttons. There is also a discreet
"Share with your friends" link that makes the banner pop down, I like that
more than having all those ugly buttons visible the whole time. I wait until
you're into your second game because I figure by that point you must like the
game, otherwise you'd have left, and then it's maybe more likely that you'll
help me promote it.

All my online card games (3 of them) also have a "Also try our other games: X
and Y" links, which drive a fair bit of traffic between them.

~~~
grzaks
That's interesting. It's similar technique to all those iphone apps/games that
ask you to rate them in appstore after playing for a while.

Did you measure the conversion rate of this rollover (that's how I call that
stuff on websites)? How many people actually use it among those who seen it?
And maybe what percent of people exits your game when you show them the
rollover?

I would really like to see some numbers :)

------
chunkyslink
Without knowing what it is you do ...

A cost effective way of getting users (I'm guessing this is ultimately what
you want) at the same time as getting decent feedback is to use a
crowdsourcing solution to get educated / computer using people to review your
site. Ask them to sign up and use the product and go through a number of
steps. Pay a thousand people to do this. If you have a good product they will
keep using it.

~~~
davedx
"Pay a thousand people to do this."

Whaa....t? You'd need a lot of money!

~~~
chunkyslink
Compare this to PPC campaigns and you might be surprised at how low the user
acquisition cost actually is.

~~~
joeyj01
On average how much would you pay for a person? $5 or $10, what would be your
offer to a person? Just want your honest opinion, because it sounds logical
but how are you going to track 1000 people if they are going to buy your
product or not? What if they take the money, signup, and leave???

~~~
hbar
The cost is very low through services like Mechanical Turk. Typically you'd
ask them to complete a survey on usability of your site -- you get some useful
feedback from them, and sometimes they return as users themselves.

~~~
notahacker
But do you get paying users from a site like that? If I'm anonymously filling
out surveys for $4 per hour I'm probably not in the target audience for your
$10 per month SaaS service or a particularly prolific purchaser via affiliate
links.

Does anyone have any actual success stories in that area?

------
ed209
These are things that have worked for me on a tiny budget / evenings+weekend
projects.

1\. Depending on resources you have, target a niche where those resources will
have an impact (focus in on blocks of 5% to 10% of your demographic) -
facebook is ideal for this sort of targeting.

2\. If you have a holding page, make joining your Facebook page / twitter acct
the next step after submitting email. e.g. "Follow our Facebook page for early
access beta codes"

3\. Get chatting in forums that are related to your business.

4\. Compile lists of resources for your target market. Like a list of useful
blogs (e.g <http://soopsee.com.tadalist.com/lists/1830681/public>) and attach
your business to it in some way

------
davidedicillo
1) Innovate: You need to innovate. I doubt people will be excited to talk
about a new social network that is just a Facebook clone.

2) Try to get free press: For SyncPad (not technically a web app) we always
tried to do things worth writing like that video with 40 iPads in drawing in
sync ([http://blog.mysyncpad.com/post/4293113601/syncpad-
on-40-ipad...](http://blog.mysyncpad.com/post/4293113601/syncpad-on-40-ipads-
simultaneously)).

3) Care about your customers: You'd be surprise how quickly the word spread
about your product if you offer awesome customer support.

------
Saketme
This should be among your first steps: Reach out to the bloggers. Tell them
about your app and if they are interested, they'll make your app reach out to
several hundred or thousands of people.

P.S.: I'm a blogger as well.

------
rahoulb
Not strictly a webapp, but I love what Balsamiq did with Mockups - gave copies
away to anyone who blogged a review. Great for spreading the word and a
fantastic way of legitimate link-building.

------
danberger
At Social Tables - seating charts for events made easy - we picked a very
early group of people to market to who could benefit from our app: brides.
Today, we have over 1,000 users (we've been quiet for the past 1 month as we
contemplate our future). Here's what worked:

1) Guerrilla Marketing - We found real life events that catered toward brides.
For example, the Running of the Brides is an annual wedding dress sale hosted
by Filene's Basement, so we showed up really early in the morning to talk to
brides waiting in line.

Here's the write-up: [http://blog.socialtables.com/post/6147037160/social-
tables-f...](http://blog.socialtables.com/post/6147037160/social-tables-field-
trip-running-of-the-brides)

2) Social Media Targeting - We monitored specific keywords "wedding & seating
chart" and "just got engaged" and replied to each of those users telling them
there was an easier way to create seating charts. We also participated in
Twitter chats (here's a list of chats:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhisaMy5TGiwcnV...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhisaMy5TGiwcnVhejNHWnZlT3NvWFVPT3Q4NkIzQVE#gid=0))
and people got intrigued. Finally, we actively tweeted using conference
hashtags during conferences that had our target audience.

I hope these two out of the box approaches help!

------
dchurchv
For <http://www.usermood.com>, the most effective promotions (in order) have
been:

1\. Referrals, referrals, referrals. People loving the product has been by far
the best way to promote it. I don't mean affiliate sales (where people are
incented to refer), just the garden variety friend telling a friend kind.
Nothing wrong with affiliates, of course, just a different thing.

2\. SEO, to a smaller degree. When people say "SEO", I usually roll my eyes,
cause it's often a non-answer. "Get lots of traffic by writing great viral
content". Which is essentially a harder problem than promoting your web app.
But having said that, at least from a search engine standpoint, it's something
that pays dividends slowly, over time.

3\. Banner ads/Google Ads - not particlarly effective, and something of a
negative ROI investment, but this was good early on to get a feel for what
kind of messaging worked best, and what sort of conversion rates were likely
from direct ads. So I'd suggest using these to learn, not as a sustainable
customer acquisition strategy, unless your price point supports it.

4\. Press/bloggers - we got some writeups by a few bloggers, which generated
some short term traffic (usually a week or so), then fell off dramatically.
Again, good for SEO, and nice to get written about, but this hasn't been a
consistent or reliable traffic source.

5\. Web app directory/startup directory sites - good for short term launch
traffic, generating awareness, etc., but these directories seem more noisy and
less relevant over time.

Hope that helps.

~~~
jimlast
2)SEO. I think you're confusing SEO with content marketing. Content marketing,
like having a blog with great content, is only a portion of SEO, albeit the
hardest portion.

------
thanasisp
We are in the consumer-social space (<http://boothchat.com>) so we need to go
out in the wild and find our customers. I'll talk about the first 2-3 weeks of
starting up.

At the very beginning you'll need to do direct "sales". Apart from any ongoing
efforts to attract press, SEO, SEM, etc, at the beginning you'll have to go
out there and beg.

Locate your target audience and create campaigns. These campaigns should
create you leads, which you'll have to turn into accounts and then
customers... I'm talking like a salesperson here because the principle is the
same. Were i mention 'accounts' imagine visitors to your website, where i
mention 'customers' imagine those visitors converting to users.

E.g. specific search for relevant to your startup keywords on Twitter. Then
engage with these users both from your personal and company twitter account.
Never "sell" directly, rather try to get into the conversation.

Do that in a systematic way for a couple of weeks and soon you'll have your
first hundred users. Of course this method does not scale, but by the time
you're done with it hopefully your other efforts (press, SEO, etc) will start
to kick in and you'll move to a whole new game...

------
aculver
A friend of mine took out an ad on The Deck (<http://decknetwork.net/>) when
he launched his app. It produced quality traffic that converted into active
users. It also opened some doors with people who could help him promote the
app reaching out to him, including his app in a bundle, etc. I thought the
cost was steep (~$8000 or so) but it seemed to pay off.

------
vladd
For <http://www.erbix.com/> we have several traffic acquisition channels
working at the moment:

1) SEO - We follow the mantra of segmenting by personnas, not features:
imagine classes of users for the webapp and present the product to them based
on each segment's needs. See for example <http://www.erbix.com/eris-form-
creator/collect-feedback/> or <http://www.erbix.com/pluto-team-organizer/to-
do-lists/> for how we did that with 2 of our most popular apps.

2) SEM - we buy keywords on AdWords, and, the critical part, we monitor
signups as conversions to be able to track those clicks that actually convert.
What we learnt in our case after spending hundreds of dollars: the clicks from
the content network were cheaper but we never got a conversion from them,
while those on the search pages performed quite well. We also zoomed into
several other characteristics of converting clicks, which lowered our price
per conversion (i.e. Thursday was from a long shoot our lowest performing day
so we stopped advertising during this day etc).

3) Blogging - see <http://www.erbix.com/blogs/erbix/view> for recent posts.

The key to all those channels is to go through a 3-step cycle continuously:
implement, measure and learn. Implement the traffic acquisition channels you
can imagine, measure the effort and the results you get (clicks, conversions),
compute the relevant acquisition price for each channel, learn from your data
and zoom into (segment) those well-performing channels hoping to find an even-
better performing niche. And repeat.

------
fenesiistvan
When i launched <http://www.mizu-voip.com/> I have spent ~2 days on forums to
mention about it, i wrote 2 blog entry and nothing more. Since then (a few
years ago) we haven't made any new effort and we have just enough customers.
So my vote is on: useful content

------
Chirag
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341138>

------
jorangreef
While you're developing your app, keep reading Hacker News for comments on
posts related to what you're working on.

For each relevant comment, jot down the comment link, author name and email
address (look at their HN profile or links therein) and write a personal
response, then and there, referencing their comment (give the link), and why
they may be interested in your app, be specific, and also point out where your
app differs from what they were talking about (it probably will). Use "Re:
Your HN comment" as the subject.

When you launch, you will have a whole lot of personal, relevant emails to
send to people who have already expressed interest indirectly. Don't send them
all at once. Send them one by one, day by day. You may learn something as you
go that you will then be able to incorporate into subsequent emails.

------
socialmediaking
Another decent way which wasn't mentioned here so far is to comment on other
blogs and pages with similar content. Not only is it a boost for SEO but, if
your app is related to the post, people who read the comments will click
through if relevant.

In SEO a main strategy is actually doing this, blackhatters use software that
automatically posts comments on related blogs, but the whitehat (clean) method
is to do it manually, and it works. Try to comment on as many high quality
blogs as possible (high Page Rank).

Tip: Try to use your keyword for your name so it is anchor text, although some
blogs might not approve your comment because of that.

------
playhard
[http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-launch-strategy-for-a-
we...](http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-launch-strategy-for-a-web-
startup?q=launch+sta)

------
awaage
Here's some ideas we've used for our B2B app incentiBox
(<http://www.incentibox.com>):

1\. Tried Press Release company that says they will push your articles out to
thousands of media sources - didn't work as well as we hoped, because they do
just what they say: "push the article out in a feed", no guarantees it will
even be picked up. I'd be careful with this one.

2\. Contacted relevant bloggers - works pretty well. You need to find relevant
bloggers so your web app is in line with their interests. Then they will
likely write about you.

3\. SEM - Google adwords. This can work, depending on the cost of your
keywords. For popular keywords (eg. "Social media") this may be too expensive
to see any results at all. It's a great way to test out initial response to
your web app and test the overall market demand. Depending on your revenue
model, if you can figure out how to set your adwords budget so that you have a
low enough average cost of acquiring a customer, you can have great results.

4\. Blogging - can be VERY effective if you keep generating relevant
information/content, especially in the long term for organic search engine
optimization. Don't dis-count the use of Twitter / Facebook, to promote your
articles, re-tweet, etc. This takes time and you might not see results right
away.

5\. Try a social-media advertising app - of course we use our own product!
Yes, a shameless plug, but depending on your webapp and target market (great
for apps targeting the younger generation), investing in social media
marketing may be a great way to get users. Check out our platform
<http://www.incentibox.com/> \- you can set up contest or rewards program in
minutes and get your visitors to help spread the word amongst their friends.
It's always refreshing to hear that people signed up because of word-of-mouth!

6\. Cold email / cold call - This imho is the best way to get INSTANT
feedback. To start, call / email 20 ppl a day, and see if there's any
interest. If yes, then it's a numbers game, and you should invest more time
into this.

I would suggest trying all that you can think of for promoting. In the
beginning it will always seem like guerrilla marketing - it pretty much is!
But hopefully that will lead you to discover which methods work for you and
which don't. Good luck!

------
pawrks
SEO and SEM are must. Working on both for our site www.Pawrks.com. Still on
launch page as we are cranking the code for the other pages we are giving
extra attention to meta tags (any suggestions welcome) Also extensively
canvassing with Facebook friends and twitter buddies to spread the word
around. Media coverage will be important just when we launch with all glory.

------
joelhaasnoot
Something that has helped us, a little more in the e-commerce space, but
listing your phone number definately drives business. We are bootstrapped, but
let the number forward to our cells. All three partners pick up the phone,
gives good connections with customers and allows us to do a good pitch and
eleviate doubts.

------
destraynor
For Intercom (<http://intercom.io>) blogging has been our most effective
weapon thus far. We'll give advertising a go soon, just to compare. But right
now it looks like a good article that's related to the product drives readers,
which we try to then funnel into the site.

------
fatalerrorx3
HN is a good place to start lol, maybe if it's intriguing enough techcrunch or
mashable will pick it up

------
frankrrr
For us (<http://www.sparklingapp.com>), Betalist worked very well. We used
this site to collect beta testers. Check it out at: <http://betali.st/>

~~~
egomaksab
Betalist doesn't seem to work with latest Safari - submission form is borked.

~~~
keesj
Could you clarify what exactly isn't working? Everything works fine here
(Safari 5.1)

Feel free to submit via email if you want: marc@betali.st

Marc Köhlbrugge (Founder of Beta List)

------
egomaksab
For my app Sprouty (<http://getsprouty.com>)

1\. SEM - Google AdWords

2\. Blog on our website blog.getsprouty.com

3\. Submit to starup/webapp sites -<http://www.submitstartup.com/>

------
kingsidharth
One thing that always worked for me is writing. I write a lot- emails, blogs,
guest posts, tweets. It tends to get you a following that not only gives you a
market to promote to but people to build for.

------
thisisnotme
I would recommend <http://projectwonderful.com> if your site is
entertainment/game oriented. They are super cheap to advertise through.

------
iggyboi
use all social media channels to market and make sure that you continue
promotion/marketing after your web application has been released

------
thewordpainter
twitter is the most powerful tool if used properly. you can cultivate a
rapport that can translate into a relationship before you know it...and for
companies like ours that are completely outside of the heart of the action,
it's allowed us to stay somewhat attached.

------
pitdesi
What field is it in? For ours (<http://feefighters.com>), which is b2b app, we
have a 6 pronged attack which works pretty well:

1) SEO - people find us when they search for credit card processing and lots
of long tail keywords. This is a long term thing but completely worth it. Make
sure all of your pages are optimized for SEO.

2) SEM - we were buying keywords on google/bing/yahoo. Facebook has been less
effective for us since we're b2b (but we tried it).

3) We get media coverage. We hustle and email and tweet a lot of reporters,
etc, try to get interviews. Try to help them out all the time, refer friends
businesses, etc. It works (<http://feefighters.com/press> \- page not quite up
to date). We paid a PR firm $5,000 a month. It didn't work.

4) We try to write interesting content on our blog/twitter
(<http://feefighters.com/blog>). People link to it and we have a lot of
subscribers who have nothing to do with our main business, but they tell their
friends. We also do infographics. I personally think they are sort of played
out (it was cool when you saw a link to one every few days but now they are
everywhere), but they can still work WHEN THEY ARE GOOD and actually explain
something well. We have some good ones and some that we aren't proud of:
<http://feefighters.com/blog/infographics/> \- good: tech bubble... bad:
restaurant one

5) Business Development - make deals with people in a similar space to sell
your app

6) We let anyone refer their friends to FeeFighters and get paid $25 for it:
[https://feefighters.com/signup-or-login-to-refer-your-
friend...](https://feefighters.com/signup-or-login-to-refer-your-friends) It
works... people want to refer us anyway, but this gives them an added
incentive that makes sense to us financially. We use Amazon.com giftcards
because they are the closest thing to cash we can think of that allows us to
purchase it on our credit card and send via email to anyone - PayPal is
annoying.

These things obviously work better for a particular type of app (one that is
the sole focus of your time and makes you money), but some of these things are
pretty universal.

~~~
redguava
I wouldn't underestimate facebook for b2b. The users that see the ads still
work at businesses. I have had very good success using these for my b2b
application.

~~~
startupstella
could you elaborate on this? what is successful and what have you learned
about ad content?

~~~
redguava
My app is <http://www.cliniko.com>

I used the "likes" targeting in the facebook ads demographics to target
occupations that my product is aimed at. I also targeted relevant english
speaking countries.

I have tried quite a few different styles of ads, but individual ads for each
occupation that were specifically targeted has the best results. I guess I
would advise creating many ads, and wording them specifically for each
demographic you want to target.

I also tried various pictures, but ultimately a screenshot of my app was the
most successful.

The majority of my users so far were acquired via the facebook advertising, it
has been my most successful strategy.

~~~
joeblue
Have you tried Linkedin? It might be a good avenue to test.

