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Honestly, the number of your users is directly correlated to your potential market. Patrick's bingo cards are going after a much smaller market (teachers) than

Honestly, the number of your users is directly correlated to your potential market. Patrick's bingo cards are going after a much smaller market (teachers) than Drew's online storage (everyone). Colin's online storage for technically astute paranoids is probably somewhere in the middle. So it really doesn't matter what you do if you're not targeting your market correctly. You have to be honest with yourself and figure that out first. Blogging on your blog isn't as good as being a good member of the relevant messageboard for your particular community, for example. (At least not for your first 1,000 users.) For us, it was cold calling on the seller side and PR on the buyer side. Turns out that the tech blogs have been much more willing to write about us than the gaming blogs. I don't get that, but hey, whatever. YMMV depending on your initial vertical.

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jlees 17y ago
Games blogs are usually fairly focused on games themselves, not the meta stuff around selling and buying them. OK, at Joystiq et al we would often do stuff like sales charts and in-person reports from the Xbox 360 line, but readers mostly visit for entertainment value. Writing about a marketplace site would come across too much like an ad, I think; we didn't highlight Amazon or Best Buy's sale items, for example! (Weirdly we did cover the digital distribution stuff a fair bit, but I think that's twofold. Firstly, most of it is from major gaming players and impacts the rest of their strategy, which fanboys will leap on. Secondly, digital distribution is still New and Exciting.)
patio11 17y ago
Honestly, the number of your users is directly correlated to your potential market. I strongly suspect this is not the case, because I have always been limited primarily by "number of prospects I can reach with my marketing" and not "number of elementary schoolteachers in the United States". (Over two million, incidentally. The Bureau of Labor Statistics will tell you all manner of fascinating things!) Nor does the percentage of teachers in the population matter very much at all, because I never address marketing to "the population", I address marketing to e.g. "the people who are searching for [bingo card activity for kids]".

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jlees 17y ago

Games blogs are usually fairly focused on games themselves, not the meta stuff around selling and buying them. OK, at Joystiq et al we would often do stuff like sales charts and in-person reports from the Xbox 360 line, but readers mostly visit for entertainment value. Writing about a marketplace site would come across too much like an ad, I think; we didn't highlight Amazon or Best Buy's sale items, for example! (Weirdly we did cover the digital distribution stuff a fair bit, but I think that's twofold. Firstly, most of it is from major gaming players and impacts the rest of their strategy, which fanboys will leap on. Secondly, digital distribution is still New and Exciting.)

patio11 17y ago

Honestly, the number of your users is directly correlated to your potential market. I strongly suspect this is not the case, because I have always been limited primarily by "number of prospects I can reach with my marketing" and not "number of elementary schoolteachers in the United States". (Over two million, incidentally. The Bureau of Labor Statistics will tell you all manner of fascinating things!) Nor does the percentage of teachers in the population matter very much at all, because I never address marketing to "the population", I address marketing to e.g. "the people who are searching for [bingo card activity for kids]".