Building the prototype took two noon-midnight Sundays, and we started promoting it after the second one. First, I posted the site on a local subreddit, which g

Building the prototype took two noon-midnight Sundays, and we started promoting it after the second one. First, I posted the site on a local subreddit, which got us up to about 20 users. We started telling friends and friends-of-friends, and my partner ponied up about $800 to run some radio ads. Fun fact: radio stations will whip up an ad for you as part of their fee. It was pretty fun hearing that on the radio. After that first hundred users or so, we started sending press releases out to anyone we thought might care. This was much easier being local, and easier still because my wife is a writer with some experience being on the receiving end of PR press releases, and she wrote it up for us. We were lucky enough to be featured in the local paper of note, got an interview on local radio, and a week later we were up to about 1000 users. The rest we've picked up more or less organically through word-of-mouth and/or google. Edit: This was back in October. I wrote this mostly about the technical details, but it has some experiential stuff too: http://adambard.com/blog/my-experiences-deploying-a-small-clojuremongo/ http://adambard.com/blog/my-experiences-deploying-a-small-cl...