I recently launched my first public beta for Decal CMS[1]. We had released http://stacklayout.com/ http://stacklayout.com/ a few months ago and had a few follow

I recently launched my first public beta for Decal CMS[1]. We had released http://stacklayout.com/ http://stacklayout.com/ a few months ago and had a few followers on Twitter and Facebook, the plan being that we would have a few people to tell about it when we released Mockups which is a tool for quickly creating StackLayout sites in a browser. It didn't work, however - none of the StackLayout crowd really seemed to care. Rather than getting bummed out, I setup a search stream in HootSuite for the word "mockup" and would ping people personally if they talked about a mockup they were working on. I also went to "list blogs" - you know "top 10 list of X" and added a link to Decal Mockups in the comments. The result was that we got 80 signups in the first week from about 400 page views. The lesson for me was that "social" doesn't have to be entirely passive and there are polite ways of doing "push social marketing" without actually being all that pushy. I've only experimented with Twitter so far but I'm sure there are other venues where you can find your voice. WARNING: following people to get them to notice you SUCKS! I tried that few times, got no results and it's a dangerous game to play - very spammy. A lot of the founders in Mixergy interviews talk about their early days and they say they spent a lot of time in forums providing answers (much like I'm doing right now :) and linking through to their produce. Slow and steady wins the race :) We can't all be threewords.me! [1]http://decalcms.com/mockups/ http://decalcms.com/mockups/