

Ask HN: What are effective ways to market a side project? - freerobby

It's easy to see how projects like threewords.me will spread virally, but what about SaaS services that don't have social components? How do you get the word out? Conversion is poor from local blogs, and Techcrunch is not likely to cover you unless you're funded.<p>What have you all tried? What's worked?
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patio11
Organic search, particularly scalable content generation: my bread and butter.
This has worked fantastically well, including when I was just working on side
projects, and requires no gatekeeper approval. It is also free to get started
working on, and plays to many of the strengths of technical founders.

AdWords: other people execute better than me on this, but my AdWords has been
routinely profitable for the last few years. I recommend a small budget while
trying to find a mix that works, then blowing it up.

Facebook ads: like setting money on fire.

Facebook viral mechanisms: apparently not a great fit with my product, and
ways I can see to improve this would make it difficult for me to look in the
mirror.

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netmau5
Would you elaborate on what you mean by scalable content generation? How is
this different from writing content or landing pages directly, how does it
become scalable? I find the content bit hard with my own side-project because
I'm having to learn to be a great writer on the side of my side project (not a
bad thing)!

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patio11
That's usually the interesting question for a project. That said, the general
sketch of making landing or content page generation scalable is figuring out
all the work it takes you personally to make one unit of content and then
automating, eliminating, or outsourcing all of it.

I talk about this a lot on my blog. In my example, the content is bingo games
on pages dedicated to any teaching activity you can think of. It scales
because the bingo card, images, and PDF can be 100% automated, and the actual
captivity can be written by someone much cheaper than me.

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staunch
One of my very favorite methods is creating plugin/add-on integration for
various platforms/software. People who use the platform/software will tell
other people that they can use your service with it. It also gives you license
to promote yourself in the appropriate directories/forums.

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firegolem
My stab at this (its still so alpha it hurts), try
<http://www.startupbeanbags.com> \- the idea is practical promotion for start
ups via the medium of beanbags :)

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freerobby
I don't understand what this is.

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kjhughes
Vinicius Vacanti listed some helpful tips in a recent blog post, "How To Get
Your First 1,000 Users:" [http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/02/08/how-to-get-
your-first-...](http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/02/08/how-to-get-your-
first-1000-users/)

