

Ask HN: How to Promote your startup on a $0 budget - kurt_bwc


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onion2k
Talk to people. Go to meet-ups, networking events, cold call potential
customers, get on social media, use free promotion services. Google 'growth
hacking', which is pretty much the art of building traction at minimal cost.
Find a cofounder who is well-connected and get them to advocate your product.
Find evangelists who'll shout about your product simply because they love it.
_Hustle._

And remember that for most technical founders, the marketing side of startups
is _really damn hard_ compared to writing code, and is absolutely the main
reason why most startups fail. You really should have this stuff figured out
before you write a single line of code because without it you have no chance
of succeeding. Products _do not_ sell themselves.

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toumhi
It depends on what you do. B2C? B2B? SaaS? Ecommerce?

At the beginning, the idea is to "do things that don't scale": do things
manually, go get your users one by one.

At the same time experiment with traction channels: SEO, content marketing,
social media, email, PR, email marketing, outbound sales. Do small experiments
and do more of what works.

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kurt_bwc
Thanks guys, your comments make sense.

By the way my product does cater to the technical crowd - basically we give
out 5 free components for websites every 7 days -
[http://buildwithcards.com/](http://buildwithcards.com/)

Let's see how it goes!

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jmnicolas
Get hacked in a spectacular way (think Sony), everybody will know about you.
Bad publicity is better than no publicity they say.

Of course it's tongue in cheek, good luck.

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atmosx
How are you going to be hacked in a spectacular if you are not already
spectacular?!?!?!

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haidrali
Definitely social media also if you can take you story to front page of HN it
will be great though it requires 100 karama

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crjHome
Twitter? Facebook? Other social media..

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andrea_sdl
since onion2k pretty much summarized everything, I'd like to share what I did
for my side-project (a time tracker named Haptime) as "marketing".

First of all, I built the software only after I found 3 people in my circle of
friends who were willing to pay it forward. This allowed me to understand if I
was solving a real problem people would pay for or not (it was important to
me, but this might not be of the same importance if you are on a freemium
model, which might require a different take on this).

After that, I pretty much used:

1\. Referral (for every client, try to make them super-happy every time and
then ask for a referral of them)

2\. Networking. Onion2k already told this, so, join and meet people who might
help you or need you. In my case one breakthrough was to find out my product
featured on product hunt (and near 100 upvotes) thanks to the relationships I
built over time.

3\. Reddit could be another place you find useful, although in my case I
discovered that it's a community more geared towards free product (so if you
have a trial, you must solve a really powerful problem to have them try it, or
have a super-compelling homepage).

4\. Quora is another place I gained a bit of traction thanks to some small,
targeted questions I answered. Not much a big deal, but it's worth checking
out.

Always remember, in everything you do, your goal must be to add value to the
people or the conversation. I personally think that when you do only for
marketing purpouse and not for the sake of adding more value to what you see,
everything ends up being bad.

5\. Giveaways are another great idea you can use, find a good blog/magazine in
your niche and see if you get to place a giveaway over there.

6\. If you are still struggling on how to build your network, the easiest way
is to help people. Find people in your niche and help them in any possible and
honest way. Don't think about marketing, think about just helping them without
selling. Networking is made of friends (at least to me).

7\. Timing is everything: If your website is featured in something like
Product Hunt, JOIN the conversation and if you can, offer a greeting offer on
your product page.

Also... time and effort is required. LOTS of it. For example Airbnb didn't
grow up in a day, but grew up thanks to small, continuous ideas and efforts.
As toumhi told you: do not automate until it's needed.

If you are an engineer you will want to automate. Resist that temptation, do
it only when you can't do it yourself at all.

One nice read about gettin traction is tractionbook.com . I read it recently,
and while some of the channels they describe for getting early users might
have a price, others are really free, so it's a worth reading.

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kurt_bwc
Thanks Andrea. This was very helpful.

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pstavro
how about HN itself!?

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NameNickHN
Only if your business caters to developers and the like.

