How did your startup get traction? How might we get traction given the details below? (I realize what worked for you might not work for us given certain differences.) What worked for you and why did it work particularly well given your business?
Our website has a modestly useful application that provides results that are slightly better than our well-known competitors. Our results are MUCH better than what an average consumer would get on their own without using us or our competitors.
Customers have offered very strong testimonials after using our service, invoking the name of God or saying that we're lifesavers. Improvements we've made for some of them have been very dramatic.
We are not well known (wouldn't be surprised if you never heard of us), but we have been mentioned in the news (like NYTimes, WSJ, Reader's Digest) in print, on TV, in blogs. We've won a few awards in our industry (like a Best-Of-[year] at an annual industry conference).
Our service is something you'd only personally use one or two times now, and then maybe it would be several months or years before you'd be in a situation to use it again. This might be the biggest challenge facing us. Getting traction seems easier for a site that you'd check every day like facebook or HN.
Because the use of our service depends on whether it applies to your situation, we are offering something that is only applicable to maybe 5% of the general population at any given moment.
The industry is boring. It takes less than 10 seconds or 2 sentences to say what we do, but it isn't something people enjoy talking about. I'm trying to come up with some similar industry for you to imagine -- maybe going to the dentist or refinancing your mortgage.
Edit (reason: collating details relevant to my company's situation here for new readers' convenience) One problem is that some portion of this 5% don't even know that our kind of thing can be done in their situation. But every time I go on a random forum and ask people if they know it can be done, all the smarty-pants reply and say Yeah-I-Already-Knew-That. I mean ... who's going to admit ignorance, really?
Many thanks in advance! (Tis my first post so apologies if I screwed up anything.)
Does your customer, when they're momentarily in the 5% of the population who needs your service, know they need your service? If so, they're searching for it on Google, using a mix of [the most obvious possible two or three word phrase a layperson would use to describe your service] and a long, long tail of various questions, concerns, and whatnot. If you are in a high money niche, and if dentists or insurance were good examples you mostly certainly are, it will be very difficult for you to attack the head of the query distribution like, e.g., "$TYPE insurance".
Is there a scalable content creation strategy in your market? Can you make one? You can leverage your mainstream attention to increase the returns on content creation targeted at more niche concerns within the niche. (You can put your earned NYT logo on a page about something much, much more specific than the NYT will ever publish about itself.)