

Pre-Launch Marketing  - hokiewater

This is my first post on Hacker News. I have been following the HN community for the past 6-7 months. Even more importantly the “ask” section has fueled energy towards my startup. So before I start my post I want to thank the HN community for continuing to uphold their reputation of high quality links and comments.  As an undergraduate the startup experience has been an extraordinary learning rollercoaster. The experience has been more than I could have ever learned in school. I hope to continue this educational and fun experience. 
Marketing and Pre-Launch: I do have a lot of questions but I’ll keep this post very specific. Our startup is about 1-1.5 months away from launch. We currently have a launch page to attract early and interested users. What are veteran tactics for creating initial buzz and hype for a site? We are looking to attend conferences – even though we will not be speaking we want use this time to meet others in the industry and spread our name. Essentially, if I took the role as a PR representative for my startup today then what would be the most effective methods of creating hype prior to launch? It seems a lot of these websites such as, Mixergy are more inclined to interview sites that have had active deployment for 6-8 months. Any advice would be helpful and greatly appreciated!
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a5seo
Start building a list of influencers in your market-- bloggers and journalists
who, if they write about you, will cause you to get sign ups. Your first stop
is Google News. Create searches for keywords that will surface blogs of
interest. AllTop, PostRank, blogrolls, twitter lists are all good options as
well. Here's a veteran's tip: don't court the mega influencers (Chris Brogan,
Jeremiah Owyang, Walt Mossberg, etc.) ... start in the second or third tier of
influencers.

Then set out to build relationships with them... start commenting on their
blogs, retweeting their stuff, emailing them story ideas (don't go nuts, keep
this short), linking to their posts from your blog (oh yeah, you should be
blogging for your prospective user audience), commenting where they comment
(see Backtype), you get the idea.

Once you feel like you've put in a couple months of solid two-way
relationship-building, reach out and offer to "brief" them (i.e. give them a
demo and talk to them about how you think about the market) and give them a
beta account. Tell them when you're launching and that you'd like them to hold
off from posting until that date. Do this with 10-20 influencers for 1-2 weeks
before launch.

Here's some additional reading I'd recommend:

<http://searchenginewatch.com/3640596>
[http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/8/jason-calacanis-on-
how...](http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/8/jason-calacanis-on-how-to-get-
pr-for-your-startup-fire-your-pr-company)
[http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/03/22/6-tips-to-
buil...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/03/22/6-tips-to-building-
relationships-with-journalists/)

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gharbad
You would get better advice if you provided more information about your
startup or a link to the landing page.

------
hokiewater
Clickable:<http://kstre.me/>

