3 ms·

What's the best launch strategy for a web startup?

60 points by ssclafani 15y ago

fleitz 15y ago
release early. release often.
ojbyrne 15y ago
All the answers seem to be from "early influencers" (Scoble most of all) advancing a view in which they're the gatekeepers. The problem with that is that you end up building products for the particularly narrow niche that is Northern California Tech PR professionals. I can think of several huge successes that as far as I can tell, were huge long before the Tech PR community discovered them. Facebook - built an audience at a single colleges first. Groupon - never heard a thing about them from the PR community, until boom they were everywhere. Zynga - just pure evil marketing crap, but seemed to work spectacularly well. So I think that completely ignoring the "early influencer" crowd and doing plain old marketing (find a market, advertises, promote, etc) is more likely to result in huge success than is playing the SF/NYC/SxSW "influencer" game.
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  Facebook sort of followed the model. It built for a niche first, then for other niches, then the niches collided with each other and they start building for mainstream and standardizing their product. Chasm Companion book(and Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado) explains this very well. http://www.princeton.edu/~guanchun/Books/The%20Chasm%20Companion.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~guanchun/Books/The%20Chasm%20Compa...
  - ojbyrne 15y ago
    I have read the book. I just think that the people who style themselves as "influencers" no longer fit the model's early adopters. Mostly because they've been professionalized. PR people aren't early adopters, they're PR people.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
swalkergibson 15y ago
It depends massively on the intended market. Is it a consumer service? SMB service? Mobile? Local? Social? Color? For a consumer service, making a big launch splash on TechCrunch, SXSW, Disrupt, etc is awesome. Not a lot of start-ups are fortunate enough to be a part of any of those events. However, just because you launch at one of these does not mean that the service will prove to be persistently successful. Certainly, you will get a huge bump in traffic off the bat, but if you do not have a great product, then it will be extremely difficult to create sustained value for your users. In my opinion, it would be far better to create a killer product, get your first 1000 users, and pay attention to what they want. Ideally, you get the PR to come to you.
vipivip 15y ago
If you have killer product PR will be hunting for you.

60 points by ssclafani 15y ago

release early. release often.

All the answers seem to be from "early influencers" (Scoble most of all) advancing a view in which they're the gatekeepers. The problem with that is that you end up building products for the particularly narrow niche that is Northern California Tech PR professionals. I can think of several huge successes that as far as I can tell, were huge long before the Tech PR community discovered them. Facebook - built an audience at a single colleges first. Groupon - never heard a thing about them from the PR community, until boom they were everywhere. Zynga - just pure evil marketing crap, but seemed to work spectacularly well. So I think that completely ignoring the "early influencer" crowd and doing plain old marketing (find a market, advertises, promote, etc) is more likely to result in huge success than is playing the SF/NYC/SxSW "influencer" game.

nextparadigms 15y ago
Facebook sort of followed the model. It built for a niche first, then for other niches, then the niches collided with each other and they start building for mainstream and standardizing their product. Chasm Companion book(and Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado) explains this very well. http://www.princeton.edu/~guanchun/Books/The%20Chasm%20Companion.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~guanchun/Books/The%20Chasm%20Compa...
- ojbyrne 15y ago
  I have read the book. I just think that the people who style themselves as "influencers" no longer fit the model's early adopters. Mostly because they've been professionalized. PR people aren't early adopters, they're PR people.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

swalkergibson 15y ago

It depends massively on the intended market. Is it a consumer service? SMB service? Mobile? Local? Social? Color? For a consumer service, making a big launch splash on TechCrunch, SXSW, Disrupt, etc is awesome. Not a lot of start-ups are fortunate enough to be a part of any of those events. However, just because you launch at one of these does not mean that the service will prove to be persistently successful. Certainly, you will get a huge bump in traffic off the bat, but if you do not have a great product, then it will be extremely difficult to create sustained value for your users. In my opinion, it would be far better to create a killer product, get your first 1000 users, and pay attention to what they want. Ideally, you get the PR to come to you.

vipivip 15y ago

If you have killer product PR will be hunting for you.