

Marketing Your Personal Projects [video] - sgdesign
https://www.discovermeteor.com/2013/10/29/marketing-your-personal-projects/

======
davelocity
Thanks Sacha. For idea validation, I'm always curious where people draw the
line. You set up a sign-up form on an existing page, yes. But how many signups
do you need before you consider it validated and worth pursuing? 10 signups?
100? 1000?

~~~
sgdesign
It depends on how many people land on that page. If you have 100 visitors a
day and you have 10 sign-ups a day, that's an awesome conversion rate and
probably a sign you can consider your idea validated.

Or you can approach it the other way around. If you have 1000 emails and you
expect to convert 5% of them for a $20 product, you know you'll earn $1000
from your current audience, and can plan from there whether or not that's
enough to justify working on a project.

Those are all random numbers obviously, but you get the idea.

------
fananta
This is great. How would you go about building an audience for a consumer
product? For example, lets say I was building Tumblr today. How would you
build an audience for it?

~~~
sgdesign
Even large apps like Snapchat or Instagram seem like they started out
targeting a specific market first. Usually for tech startups that market is
simply early adopters (or HN readers), but it could also be teenagers, photo
enthusiasts, etc.

My point is that thinking of your audience as "everybody" isn't very helpful,
so it can be a good idea to artificially restrict it to a particular segment
even if (like Tumblr, Twitter, etc. did) you intend to eventually conquer the
whole planet :)

So if I was building Tumblr today, I would first try building an audience in
communities that I'm already familiar with, such as designers or the HN crowd.

------
sgdesign
Let me know if you have any questions/feedback/etc. :)

