
How can/should I publicize my startup? - joe

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staunch
This is really a great question. It's tough being isolated and tiny. At this
stage you would rather be hated than ignored, but one even cares enough to
hate you.

For your first users I think you have to do it "the hard way", by really
_selling_ the product. Go manually find the low-hanging fruit for your
product. Find the early adopters -- the people who will be delighted to learn
your product exists and immediately understand its utility.

Bug all the people you know and get them to use your product where it makes
sense.

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joe
A little background: I'm the lead developer on a self-funded Web startup. It's
a (mostly) free service to help musicians and bands stay in touch with their
fans. I have a lot of confidence in it as a great product. What are some
(cheap) ways I can make noise about it and get people using the site?

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python_kiss
Here is a nice tactic I came up with: Type your competition's name in
Technorati and determine all the blogs that reviewed your competitior. Next,
dispatch an email to all those bloggers informing them that you have created a
rival product. The bloggers are usually interested in covering products
similar to those they have covered in the past :)

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PindaxDotCom
You could start by giving us the url lol!

My #1 guideline is never pay for publicity. Look for free publicity always!

~~~
joe
http://www.scriggle-it.com/

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corentin
Go to concerts, offer drinks to the bands and talk about (read: sell) your
product. I don't know if it's efficient (I guess it probably is) but at least
it's fun.

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domp
How about emailing people at some of the popular ezines that are in your
target demographic. They could post about it and you'd probably get a lot of
traffic and artists interested in signing up.

I also agree that going to shows and introducing yourself to bands will help.
Any personal interaction like that would get me to try out the service over a
junk spam message on myspace.

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r7000
The feature set you have put together might be very useful to some potential
users who aren't bands. You might be in one of those "we built it thinking of
market X but ended up filling a need for Y" sort of situations.

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joe
What sort of alternative end users (or possibly uses) would you foresee?

There are already quite a few generic mailing list services out there, which
is why we're trying to target musicians and build a site centered around fan
bases.

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dawie
Look at ways to make it viral. Get fans to invite each other

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staunch
Find customers using a crappy solution to the problem you have a good solution
to. Help them move to your solution.

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agentbleu
try startupcrunch

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joe
If only it didn't cost money. We've also considered newswire press release
services, etc., but I'm unconvinced as to how things like that would attract
actual users.

