One CAN get initial traction and customers without having to be an internet celebrity. A fantastic first step is to ask to the internet marketing community. I'

One CAN get initial traction and customers without having to be an internet celebrity. A fantastic first step is to ask to the internet marketing community. I'll summarize my tips on this issue to try and help the readers as much as I can, but please reach out to SEO/SEM/Branding people in the community at each stage of your start-up journey so you can keep learning, growing and driving traffic to your site. So here's my advice to find those early customers: - Build a fascinating product. Something that is better than every competitive proposal in one or more dimensions (design, speed, simplicity, robustness, etc). You know you have this when you feel passionate about your product. At this point, it doesn't matter to have erred in some minor market assumptions. Just do a solid MVP given your current understanding of the market needs. - Go to search.twitter.com and find 50 people that are looking for the solution you provide (i.e. search for "i want a widget that does x") - Network with this group of 50, give them premium accounts and give them early access to your product. Congrats, you've got a nice beta testing team with a desire for your product. - Reverse engineer the "mind-set" of this group of people: do they want speed, low price or robust functionalities? Then, according to this create "personas", ergo user profiles. - Now comes the fun part: you're going to market to each independent user profile with a separate marketing effort. Before doing this, install Mixpanel and make sure you're tracking EACH distinct user profile. Then place one Google Adwords campaign for each profile. You want to discover which user profile prefers your product, which type of user converts best, etc. To get ideas for keywords I recommend Wordtracker.com (some people like the Google keyword tool, but that's ok as well). - Since now you know the type of user you want to target raise your bets: create multiple landing pages for this user type (the article gives you a good idea of how to do just that). - Tweak the conversion rate (ratio of sign-ups per visits) that each page gives you. Ideas to do this include: creating professional introductory videos, adding testimonials, doing basic A/B testing, refining your copy, etc. - Keep refining you product. And. keep. marketing. There's so so much you can do on a budget: pay for press releases to boost your page rank and get initial awareness (under 400 dollars on prweb.com), join several interest groups and promote to their mailing list, etc. - Internet famous celebrities don't have THAT high of an advantage over you (when it comes to marketing). They DO have great advantages when it comes to raising money but, for the purpose of building a compelling MVP... how many people do you need? Not many. You're better off with a mix of the right people and a tight knit community.