

Ask YC: How do we announce the alpha launch? - prashantdesale
http://onista.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/how-do-we-announce-the-alpha-launch/

======
swombat
How about starting by getting some target users using it and seeing whether
they spread the word and recommend it to their friends?

The rest is all very nice, but a bit OTT for an alpha launch. Not putting down
your work at all, but anything that hasn't got real users yet is probably
still a _long_ way from being worthy of being officially "launched".

If you media-blitz and overhype it and it's not ready, you'll end up pulling a
Cuil and losing most of your target audience on day 1.

Once you have a few hundred normal users who are telling you your product
kicks ass, then think about marketing. Until then, focus on getting your
product right.

~~~
wheels
I sometimes read things like this and wonder if I should honestly take them
seriously or not.

Cuil did great on the PR front. Sure, their product wasn't all that wonderful,
but getting that much attention even if lackluster is something most startups
can only dream of.

We're in a similar situation to the poster, but since we're B2B our "testing"
basically means working with two customers. We're planning on launching with
as much hooplah as we can raise when our demo site goes live in the near
future.

There's a lot of power in a launch; it's your chance to get it right and get
some attention. At no other point early in the startup will you have as much
momentum to getting PR attention. If you can pull it off reasonably it's a
great chance to catapult your startup a good ways down the road.

~~~
swombat
I totally agree. There _is_ a lot of power in the launch. That's why you
should only use it once you have something that can actually impress then tens
of thousands of people who'll come and have a look.

You say Cuil did a great job on the marketing. Yes, they did. However, most
people who went and tried Cuil had a bad experience. That compares very
unfavourably with Google, which is unflinchingly brilliant. Result? Sure, Cuil
did great by getting (say) a million people to try them on the first day. But
of that million, maybe a thousand will actually use them more than once.

It's not really worth going through all that PR work if your stick rate is
only 0.1%. Unless, of course, the whole thing was about investors / buyers,
not about users (which I believe is the case).

------
nostrademons
I'd do the early phases like this:

1.) Release to family members, trusted friends & people that have a stake in
the project. Get their feedback.

2.) Release on news.YC. Get their feedback.

3.) Find some influential bloggers in your field. Don't release to them;
instead, send them a personal e-mail asking for their feedback.

4.) Go to forums in your field, pick out some dedicated early users that are
really into the space. Send them personal e-mails and get their feedback.

5.) Release to the blogs and forums you identified in 3.) and 4.) Pay close
attention to feedback and iterate.

6.) Release on Reddit/Digg/the rest of your list.

I've been a part of a startup that tried the PR blitz thing and it failed
miserably, because we didn't serve any useful purpose. Gotta make it basically
good before people will pay attention.

There've also been several times when I've released on news.YC to a very ho-
hum reception and then killed the project, or otherwise took it in very
different directions. That's probably not the response you want to hear, but
it's much better to kill a product without a market early than to keep
improving it speculatively.

~~~
prashantdesale
Sounds like a good plan and yes this is what we shall do. Iterating is the
best approach as we get some time to fix the issues before more users know
about it.

Any idea on how to find influential bloggers? (Besides Googling) Like is there
any blog searching place that shows me ranks of blogs (based on traffic) and
and have those distributed in categories like (Technology, Business,
E-commerce, blah...)

~~~
nostrademons
I'm not really one to ask, since it's not like I've had great luck finding
influential bloggers, and I usually leave the marketing to others anyway. I'd
check out your competitors, see who's commenting or writing about them, and
then see if they have blogs or homepages though.

------
drandall
If you do announce something, don't call it a 'launch' call it an 'alpha.'
When you do a beta, call it a beta. Don't use the word launch until you're
ready, b/c any news is going to say "But you launched in August! What's new?"
and all you can say is "We're out of beta" or something like that.

~~~
prashantdesale
Very good advice. You are absolutely right. I did not think of that.

Thank you very much.

~~~
agotterer
That actually happened to use with PriceAdvance. We "launched" our beta and
then officially launched a few months later and a number of write ups
mentioned we had already previously launched.

Also if your going to submit to techcrunch, make sure they are the first. They
like to break news. You have a better chance of being covered if they get
dibs.

------
huhtenberg
> 8\. Create Wikipedia page for Onista.

Wikipedia is not a promotion vehicle and using it as such is one of the most
blatant and despised violations of WP editing policies (which you should
familiarize yourselves with). Your article _will_ be speedy-deleted; moreover,
it will be very hard to restore the article later on even if your project does
become notable. Keep this in mind.

~~~
prashantdesale
Thanks a lot. I was not aware of it.

------
matt1
Hey, I Googled 'Onista' and found your recent Vimeo video:
<http://www.vimeo.com/1376104> as well as some introductions in various
forums. Looks like you're building up the hype well.

My 2c after watching the video: I don't understand the instant negotiation. Is
there a limit on the number of times I can submit a bid? If not, can't I just
start really low and then increment by $1 or $2 until I meet the minimum? If
there is a limit, what's stopping me from setting up multiple accounts so that
I can discover the minimum, then bid that amount on my legit account? Since
this seems to be a major differentiation point, I hope you've ensured there is
no easy way to cheat the system ;)

Also, how do people pay each other? If you're relying on people to exchange
money privately, how are you going to handle disputes?

One more thing about the video: your accent. I'd try to get someone without an
accent, probably a woman. I think this would appeal more to your target
audience.

How many people do you have working on this besides you?

As far as the Onista site goes, you've done a fantastic job with it. There
seems to do and explore and the interface is intuitive and clean.

Wish you the best of luck in the coming weeks!

Matt

~~~
prashantdesale
Hey Matt,

Yeah, that video will be linked from our index page to show demo. Regarding
accent, yes that is one thing we need to fix. I and my partners all are
Indians (moved to US almost years back) and hence have heavy accent. I am
trying to find somebody who does not have accent and willing to help us do the
narration.

About negotiation process, buyer can attempt as many times as he wants to
negotiate the price, but if it is accepted then it will be locked for that
particular product for that particular buyer. We have written pretty smart
algorithm for negotiation and it will be impossible for buyer to know the
minimum because it keeps on changing based on demand, requests, popularity,
and lot of other factors.

So far we are 3 working on this parttime. We all have fulltime jobs and are
developing onista on weekends and evenings.

------
demandred
Just release already.

This from 28 February 08 (and blog posts dating back about 9 to 10 months as
well):

 _We have been working on our Social Marketplace “Onista” for quite sometime
and every week (and every month) we think we are almost ready for launch “only
if we fix these remaining little issues”. To be honest, there is no such thing
called “little issues”. There are bugs in product (tons of bugs) and we must
fix those before launching._

------
pibefision
First, fix your subscription news form.

"There has been an error submitting your email address. Please contact us at
contact@onista.com."

~~~
prashantdesale
Thanks for pointing it out. Fixed. Moved to new server and missed recreating
this table. This table was not part of the other schema.

------
abstractbill
You list "Create Wikipedia page for Onista". I wouldn't advise it - you'll
just get the page deleted immediately for not being notable.

------
Harkins
You don't. Alpha tests are, by definition, internal-only.

~~~
cperciva
_Alpha tests are, by definition, internal-only._

There are several different definitions. One definition I like is that alpha
testing is when you know there are still missing features, while beta testing
is when the planned features exist and you're just trying to make sure that
they all work properly -- in which case you could very easily have public
alpha testing.

~~~
prashantdesale
We have done lot of testing on our application using some external users as
well and fixed close to 2k bugs to make it more stable. As you are suggesting,
we are planning public Alpha.

~~~
cperciva
_fixed close to 2k bugs_

* blink *

How much code do you have? I've been writing code for my own startup for about
20 months, and after 25k lines of code I'd say I've fixed maybe 50 bugs in
total.

~~~
prashantdesale
There is lot of code. Onista is amalgam of eBay, Priceline, LendingTree,
Alibaba and LinkedIn. When I say that, what I'm trying to say is that site has
lots and lots of features. We have done testing using different data set and
lots of scenarios to find bugs. We also redesigned lot of features. It did
take us to fix close to 2k bugs to get to stable state.

