> Maybe too much beginner advise for solo startup founders is 'hussle' as in: place your URL anywhere you can.
I did 4 years at a startup where my job was essentially this (we were a small news startup and I lead a small team of mostly college interns sharing links to our news videos with bloggers). _However_, there is a very crucial step I've rarely seen followed in the wild, and that is _actually_ engage in the conversation. "Cool, here's a URL to my product" is spam. But actually investing time into a thoughtful comment (and first evaluating whether your product is actually a good fit for the problem) is not, IMO.
"But I don't have time" is not a valid excuse here. If you don't have time to engage with your prospective customers and really understand their needs and where they're at, what are you doing communicating about your product?
In my experience doing this, you'll still get a mix of people who receive it well and some who don't. Keep a list of both. Then you know who to follow up with and who to avoid so you don't develop an antagonistic relationship with them.
Also, looking at the numbers, this didn't look like a particularly cost-effective approach to communication at the time. We were not at all playing a numbers game but were instead trying to build relationships with bloggers who would feel comfortable including our content where they believed it would genuinely contribute to their blog and their audience. Over time, maybe the time we invested up-front paid off. I left to other things before I got to assess that.
On the other hand, we were basically developing relationships with unpaid "influencers" around 2008-2012, so maybe we were on to something (in any case, the startup sold to E.W. Scripps for ~$35 million in 2014 and is still part of their portfolio today).
When I was doing this we'd still link the URL in the content of our reply. But it would be part of a natural reply that engaged with the surrounding conversation, not just mindless copy-paste spam like "Nice, btw check out my video: <link>"
I did 4 years at a startup where my job was essentially this (we were a small news startup and I lead a small team of mostly college interns sharing links to our news videos with bloggers). _However_, there is a very crucial step I've rarely seen followed in the wild, and that is _actually_ engage in the conversation. "Cool, here's a URL to my product" is spam. But actually investing time into a thoughtful comment (and first evaluating whether your product is actually a good fit for the problem) is not, IMO.
"But I don't have time" is not a valid excuse here. If you don't have time to engage with your prospective customers and really understand their needs and where they're at, what are you doing communicating about your product?
In my experience doing this, you'll still get a mix of people who receive it well and some who don't. Keep a list of both. Then you know who to follow up with and who to avoid so you don't develop an antagonistic relationship with them.
Also, looking at the numbers, this didn't look like a particularly cost-effective approach to communication at the time. We were not at all playing a numbers game but were instead trying to build relationships with bloggers who would feel comfortable including our content where they believed it would genuinely contribute to their blog and their audience. Over time, maybe the time we invested up-front paid off. I left to other things before I got to assess that.
On the other hand, we were basically developing relationships with unpaid "influencers" around 2008-2012, so maybe we were on to something (in any case, the startup sold to E.W. Scripps for ~$35 million in 2014 and is still part of their portfolio today).