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It's one thing to launch early, simple and test. It's a whole other issue with discovery. Sure, it's easy to launch a webapp as your startup. But how will your

by chewxy 14y ago

It's one thing to launch early, simple and test. It's a whole other issue with discovery. Sure, it's easy to launch a webapp as your startup. But how will your first customers or users discover you? A lot has been said about launching early or simple or lean. Not enough however, has been said about earliest discovery. It's sure easy to launch a startup to test when you have thousands of followers already. It's a whole other issue when you don't have any followers (not only on twitter, but everywhere on the internet.. the sum total of your audience)

bryanh 14y ago
We wrote [1] really briefly on that exact problem, which was one we faced. I'd like to expand on this, because I think you are 100% right. Launching is only half the battle. [1] https://zapier.com/blog/2012/04/05/finding-early-customers-when-you-arent-internet-famous/ https://zapier.com/blog/2012/04/05/finding-early-customers-w...
- chewxy 14y ago
  ObamaNotBad.jpg! We've also had some success with content strategy (blogging, guest blogging etc), but that was really time consuming and more stressful than writing software. Only the committed will prevail in that. Or cheating (like hiring university english students to write articles for you) Long tail is hit/miss in my opinion. I use adplanning software all the time, and it really is a hit or miss
- joonix 14y ago
  Thanks, already integrated a few of your recommendations in my site. Can anyone recommend a good landing page generator for someone who isn't a front end developer? A site where I can quickly generate high quality landing pages. My attempts to find a (free) service in the past were surprisingly futile: I figured there'd be a ton of them out there for the internet marketing crowd.
  - chewxy 14y ago
    I found that Landerous on Themeforest actually did very well with conversions as long as your propositions are clear. I've deployed Landerous on 4/6 of my projects so far.
  - WadeF 14y ago
    Unbounce (http://unbounce.com/ http://unbounce.com/) is about as good as they come.
joonix 14y ago
Yeah, same thing I thought while reading the article. Getting the word out that you have something new to offer has become progressively harder on the internet, due to all the noise that's out there now. I had a breeze launching my video site in 2006 because it was easy to get people's attention back then. I don't have any "followers" or a blog. Luckily the service I launched today is something I can sell over Adwords, but as far as organic, there's nothing I can really do except SEO, which is going to take a long time to build up.
- chewxy 14y ago
  Hmm maybe not followers, but your total online audience (which in this case also includes your HN profile). So what did you launch today?
zaidf 14y ago
Part of what launching early does is let you realize and attack this question of "how do I get users?" much earlier. It sounds common sense but very smart people spend months building things before even realizing they have no users. At least when you launch in a couple weeks or months, the problem becomes very apparent when you see a single digit number in your user table's row count and then have the "oh shit" moment. Some may say you should begin your start up with the oh shit moment but launching early and having it is a better alternative than launching much later and realizing this.
- chewxy 14y ago
  I agree. After launching and failing a few times, I've come to the realization of that, and right now for anything I have in the pipeline, "how do I get users" is the first question to be solved. Before a single line of code is written
mbesto 14y ago
There's two schools of thought here: 1) Push Method - Create your attention. In-bound marketing techniques such as: Blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, enewsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing[1] 2) Pull Method - Buy your attention. You can do this via traditional marketing activities, such as PR, advertising, and spam. Both have their associative costs and neither can be considered anecdotal to success. Either way - as you rightfully put - you need a plan. The earlier the better. [1]- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbound_marketing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbound_marketing

by chewxy 14y ago

bryanh 14y ago

We wrote [1] really briefly on that exact problem, which was one we faced. I'd like to expand on this, because I think you are 100% right. Launching is only half the battle. [1] https://zapier.com/blog/2012/04/05/finding-early-customers-when-you-arent-internet-famous/ https://zapier.com/blog/2012/04/05/finding-early-customers-w...

chewxy 14y ago
ObamaNotBad.jpg! We've also had some success with content strategy (blogging, guest blogging etc), but that was really time consuming and more stressful than writing software. Only the committed will prevail in that. Or cheating (like hiring university english students to write articles for you) Long tail is hit/miss in my opinion. I use adplanning software all the time, and it really is a hit or miss
joonix 14y ago
Thanks, already integrated a few of your recommendations in my site. Can anyone recommend a good landing page generator for someone who isn't a front end developer? A site where I can quickly generate high quality landing pages. My attempts to find a (free) service in the past were surprisingly futile: I figured there'd be a ton of them out there for the internet marketing crowd.
- chewxy 14y ago
  I found that Landerous on Themeforest actually did very well with conversions as long as your propositions are clear. I've deployed Landerous on 4/6 of my projects so far.
- WadeF 14y ago
  Unbounce (http://unbounce.com/ http://unbounce.com/) is about as good as they come.

joonix 14y ago

Yeah, same thing I thought while reading the article. Getting the word out that you have something new to offer has become progressively harder on the internet, due to all the noise that's out there now. I had a breeze launching my video site in 2006 because it was easy to get people's attention back then. I don't have any "followers" or a blog. Luckily the service I launched today is something I can sell over Adwords, but as far as organic, there's nothing I can really do except SEO, which is going to take a long time to build up.

chewxy 14y ago
Hmm maybe not followers, but your total online audience (which in this case also includes your HN profile). So what did you launch today?

zaidf 14y ago

Part of what launching early does is let you realize and attack this question of "how do I get users?" much earlier. It sounds common sense but very smart people spend months building things before even realizing they have no users. At least when you launch in a couple weeks or months, the problem becomes very apparent when you see a single digit number in your user table's row count and then have the "oh shit" moment. Some may say you should begin your start up with the oh shit moment but launching early and having it is a better alternative than launching much later and realizing this.

chewxy 14y ago
I agree. After launching and failing a few times, I've come to the realization of that, and right now for anything I have in the pipeline, "how do I get users" is the first question to be solved. Before a single line of code is written

mbesto 14y ago

There's two schools of thought here: 1) Push Method - Create your attention. In-bound marketing techniques such as: Blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, enewsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing[1] 2) Pull Method - Buy your attention. You can do this via traditional marketing activities, such as PR, advertising, and spam. Both have their associative costs and neither can be considered anecdotal to success. Either way - as you rightfully put - you need a plan. The earlier the better. [1]- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbound_marketing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbound_marketing