

Ask HN: How would you market a new product launch?  - iag

I know there are plenty of successful entrepreneurs who reads this site so I want to pick HN's collective brains on this. What are the steps you take to ensure a successful product launch?<p>A little background. We are days away from launching www.cardmunch.com, a dead-simple way to transcribe business cards on mobile device with unbelievable accuracy(launch pending AppStore approval). Until recently most of our efforts has gone into building the product over launch marketing. Now I find that being small and new really work against you when trying to get the attention of the big blogs.<p>Would you mind sharing some of your product launch strategies / experiences? There seem to be so much that you can do to market a new product. In your opinion, which approach is worth the time and effort and how would you prioritize it over other approaches? What are some of the time sink that I should definitely avoid? And any out-of-the-box ideas that ended up working out really well for you?<p>Would love to hear your thoughts on this.<p>P.s. If any HN readers has a pile of business cards that they would like to get the contacts right on their phone, shoot me an email at bowei@cardmunch.com. I'd be happy to give you a sneak peek of what are we doing.
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michael_dorfman
What I'd suggest is to find a way to make your story into a story. In other
words, come up with a hook, a narrative that helps the story write itself.

Put another way: what's so special about CardMunch, as opposed to the iPhone
app I already use (where I take a photo of a business card, and it scans it
into my Contacts)?

If there's not a compelling "unique value proposition" for the product, what's
so special about you guys? What makes this not just another launch amongst a
million?

~~~
iag
Thanks Michael. There are many ways I can tackle this because there are lots
of features worth mentioning. But I remember that when you say a lot and lose
focus, people tend to lose focus too.

I narrowed it down to 2 areas that I can say CardMunch has a very "unique
value proposition".

For one, we are unbelievably accurate. Anyone used a card scanning devie/app
would know that the accuracy is atrocious. That's a problem because a wrong
contact is worse than no contact. We don't send anything back unless it's 100%
accurate, even if we have to employ multiple people to double, triple check
the answer.

Another angle is the simplicity. We made it so that everything is as simple as
possible. You don't need to take a picture, just point your phone at a card,
CardMunch automatically recognizes your card and uploads / transcribes /
imports the contact right into the phone, all that with 0-click. We also do
real-time syncing so that every update gets backed up on the server, so you
never have to worry about losing a contact. All that that is done with 0
clicks, just let CardMunch handle it all.

If you were to propose a story to market this product, which in your opinion
is a more compelling hook for a story, and why?

Thanks again for your feedback!

~~~
michael_dorfman
I think you hit on a good story in a response to someone else, about your
alpha user who needed to scan a bunch of cards he collected at a conference.

Think about your (small set of) users so far. What's the coolest, most
noteworthy thing someone has used your product for?

Find (or make happen) a human interest story. A bride who used the product to
scan all of the business cards of all of the wedding-related vendors
(florists, caterers, etc.) Someone who is using CardMunch to cure cancer.

"Accuracy" and "Ease of Use" are great-- the point is to find a narrative that
gets the point across.

Tell me a "real world" story about a time when "a wrong contact was worse than
no contact."

~~~
iag
Hah, CardMunch didn't cure cancer, but here's true story that people could
relate to.

I remember one day this beta user decided to send in a bunch of cards for
process. It was nothing out of the ordinary except the stream of cards just
kept coming. By the end of the hour, he had sent in 470 contacts. We completed
them fairly quickly, but out of curiosity we calculated exactly how much
manhours we spent processing his cards.

19.93 HRs.

Arguably that's how much time he saved, because he didn't have to do
everything on his own. It was pretty sweet.

So maybe the title of the story would be: "how we saved one user 19.93 hours
in one Friday afternoon"?

Is that something you can relate to? :)

~~~
petervandijck
That's actually not bad. Keep searching for stories like this, compile a few,
then go to press. Features are boring. Stories are good.

------
charlesju
Just looked at your site. What a cool idea. I've always had trouble figuring
out how to get my business cards digitized. This is definitely a big move! How
do I sign up?

~~~
iag
cool, email me at bowei@cardmunch.com. Let me give you a sneak peek.

~~~
aantix
Why not put this contact info right on your front page? Even if you have to
demo over a simple Skype session or provide a video, do it. If people want to
see (even if it's no currently available) let them see. You could probably use
Skype for one on one demos or WebEx or something if there were a group of
people interested in a viewing.

~~~
iag
Ha, that landing page is from our stealth era, when we didn't want to give any
information.

But good point, we should probably give a bit more information now that we're
about to release. I'll get on that.

------
willcheung
For our launch, we also tried reaching out to tech / travel blogs to write
about us. I found the time spent following-up and convincing them that your
product is awesome wasn't worth it when you can be coding or improving the
product (it was probably 10% conversion rate for us). A month later, I found a
lady with good PR network to help us draft a press release and reach out to
her network. Within weeks, we were on Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and other tech
blogs. If you don't mind spending some money, I'd suggest you save time &
frustration and hire a contractor to help with the news splash.

~~~
iag
Point taken. Forwarding your PR lady's contact to bowei@cardmunch.com? :) Much
appreciated!

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nudge
Write to bloggers with audiences that are your potential customers. Tell them
about your product and politely ask if they would like to feature you in a
post. Offer some pre-written copy (not too much) for them to use or cut/paste
from to make it easier for them. Offer free downloads of your software for
e.g. 5 of their readers (but don't do that for everyone you email).

Keep it brief, be polite, and some might bite. Michael Dorfman's advice about
your USP and your story (either/both are good for bloggers) is good advice to
keep in mind when thinking of what to write.

~~~
iag
nugde, that sounds very reasonable, but I am skeptical if that would make you
stand out. Have you had reasonable success doing this?

I always wonder if bloggers reads our emails. It seems like they would get so
many of these story everyday, do they have time to read everything?

Bloggers, please feel free to chime in? Do you only read the emails with
interesting titles? :)

~~~
nudge
I confess this is advice I have gathered from others, rather than something
that has worked for me (I haven't tried it for a paid product site like
yours). It will always be a lottery emailing busy bloggers, but you could get
lucky!

Something I have had success with is emailing smaller blogs that I know often
feed stories to the larger ones, and also blogs that have insatiable appetites
for new stories. Regarding smaller blogs, something that worked very well for
me is to contact first the international spinoffs of highly popular blogs,
rather than the standard US one - often they get far fewer emails daily, and
stories they write get picked up by the main site.

edit: One way to get bloggers' attention would be to just give them a copy of
your app. Don't write as if you're just asking for a write-up. Write to tell
them you think they could probably benefit from your product, and you'd like
to give them a free copy. And that if they like it, here's your phone number /
email for more information.

~~~
iag
That's great to hear nudge. Can you recommend me a few small blogs that you
had great experiences with?

~~~
iag
Nudge, I found it.

FYI for those interested, this is a very good read.

[http://balsamiq.com/blog/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-
advice...](http://balsamiq.com/blog/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-advice-from-
balsamiq-studios/)

------
edge17
Wow, cool. I had one of those card scanners, but they always end up being more
work and I end up never using it. Can't wait to try this out.

~~~
iag
same, shoot me an email at bowei@cardmunch.com

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akalsey
One thing that's always frustrated me about these sort of apps is that I don't
actually want every business card I pick up at a conference to become a
contact. I want to collect the information electronically, but I don't want to
stuff my contacts with people I'm not regularly contacting.

~~~
iag
Akalsey, that's a perfect use case for CardMunch.

A little back story: One of our alpha user complained about this so much that
we decided to delay our schedule to re-write CardMunch. We spent bulk of that
time re-writing, and replicating the entire Apple address book framework.

What that enabled us to do is to create a completely separate address book
from your personal address book. All of your business cards can go to either
address books, and to switch between the two, it's just flip of a button. You
won't have to worry about random business contact popping up in your personal
address book.

I know it sounds a bit salesy, but the feature is really awesome. I'm glad we
decided to implement it. I have about 800 contacts in my CardMunch address
book for testing purposes, I would hate to put these in my personal address
book.

~~~
pdebruic
When you say "All of your business cards can go to either..." is that what you
mean or do you mean "Each of your business cards can go to either..."?

I imagine there's a subset of each that should be moved from one to the other.

Also - with you mapping my social/business network as I create it I'd be
concerned about your intended uses of the data you collect. Certainly you
could have your own LinkedIn/Facebook style connection graph built pretty
quickly. Then what?

~~~
iag
pdebruic, apologize for my rushed comment. Yes, you can easily move individual
cards from one to another, it's very flexible.

I think we're all spooked by the facebook fiascos lately. But if we all take a
step back, businesses similar to CardMunch have existed for years, just check
out CloudContact, CardScan, Shoeboxed...

------
lazy388
Interesting angle on the business card problem. Looking forward to seeing this
after release.

In terms of advice, how about buying adspace or sites like Free-App-A-Day?

