Ask HN: “If you build it, they will come” doesn't work. How do we market our app? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: “If you build it, they will come” doesn't work. How do we market our app?

85 pointsmstipetic72 comments

Hi,

My friend and I have been building an app (at http://getlooksgood.com/) in our spare time for more than a year, but we're clueless on how to get users to the page.

The app is fashion oriented and we think has potential, but that is not our area of expertise at all. Does anybody who has been in a similar situation have any advice? Do you think we should pursue it further or give up? It has been a great learning experience and a fun project to work on, so it's not all bad.

Thanks for your time!

View on HN

Reading the advice from this thread hurts. Has anyone here actually "gone to market" with what they're saying?

Having built and launched a successful go to market strategy here are my tips for you. Ultimately because it seems like you're bootstrapping and have limited funds since it's a side project, you want to aim for a scalable strategy that will give you a CPI that makes sense for your monetization path (ROI).

Note: I'm not even sure you're ready to go to market so ill assume you are.

1) Influencer Marketing: Do manual reach out and negotiations or hire someone with the network/connections who can help you with this. Since you're in the fashion niche there are tons of instgram/youtube influencers that would promote your app for a fee.

2) Content distribution: Get bloggers or guest posts up about your app on sites/blogs that have massive traffic and engagement.

3) PR: If you're running this as a business then there beeds to be a need in the market for your product that you must reach out to journalists and tell...ie your story. You can use HARO as well.

4) Viral coefficient: Make sure this is engineered into your funnel otherwise you're missing out on reaching critical mass and will steuggle to acquire users sustainably.

If you have questions let me know!

Hope this helps.

Thanks for taking the time to answer!

We've been thinking of going the route of approaching the route of Content creators/Influencers, that intuitively seems like the correct way. Have you done something like this, do you have any rough figures how much could a small-scale campaign like that cost, as I can't even guess the order of magnitude?

Also, the HARO resource seems great, I had no idea about it, thanks!

This is a great answer, but I'm curious why you put viral coefficient last? You don't to waste your PR effort by driving users who churn quickly and don't invite more users. Why not focus on the engagement part first?

(Not a rhetorical question. I'm genuinely curious to know what I'm missing.)

1) Hustle. Talk to people about your app. Tell everyone you know about it. Tell them to use it. If someone doesn't want to use your app, ask them why. If you can't find a dozen people who use your app, there's something wrong with your app and you need to go back to the drawing board.

2) Content. If your app is about fashion, make sure you have gorgeous fashion on your website. I see two half-assed selfies on your website. Get professional photos that make me think: YES I want to look like this. YES I want to look at photos of people like this. And don't fill your blog with SEO crap. If you can't write well, post pretty photos instead.

3) No ads. Ignore all advise about buying ads or hiring an SEO agency. Doing that stuff right is really hard, and if you can't do it yourself you won't be able to afford the people who can do it right. It's really easy to spend all your money on ineffective advertisement. You can advertise after you have some initial traction, but advertising wont help you get a broken product off the ground.

Thanks for your feedback!

The main problem with starting an app like this is that it basically doesn't work without having a substantial number of users. Even with a dozen people onboard, it will still feel very empty. We need a way to gain a larger following quickly to get the ball rolling, and for the user interaction with it to even make sense.

As for the selfies on the website, we had the idea of using real photos that you might find on the app, instead of some obviously professionally made photos, but, yes, that might be the wrong approach.

And yes, I really feel that the "No ads" is the way to gain a real following, and if the app is good, it will spread organically.

"The main problem with starting an app like this is that it basically doesn't work without having a substantial number of users."

I think the traditional advice is "fake it 'til you make it".

Is your concern that you will have too many photos and not enough people rating? Rate them yourselves.

Not enough photos for raters to feel engaged? Send every photo to everyone, tune it down when you can.

Yes, some of those tactics are being employed, however the number of users is so low it doesn't really matter.

To get technical, since this is HN, the photo distribution part is done by a Lua script running inside of redis instance which does just that, distributing images based on current demand and skewed towards recent ones. But if the number of images is small, every image will try to be distributed.

I disagree. You can totally make this app work even if there are only a handful users. Just make sure there are some initial pictures to look at (take them yourself) and make sure that anyone who submits a photo gets replies quickly (by monitoring activity and immediately sending feedback yourself). Yes, at some point all the content should come from users; for now you'll have to provide some of it.

Concerning the selfies on the website: I guess they should look like you'd find them on the app. But you can still pick properly lit shots where the model looks into the camera with a nicely decorated apartment in the background.

Yes, we could do more on the "hustle" and "fake it 'till you make it" part.

We'll look into the website selfies to make them nicer, thanks!

Take a page from Reddit's book and fake it till you make it.

Have you and your friend considered bringing in another partner who understands fashion marketing and branding?

Yes, of course. We've been having trouble finding such person. We'd be happy to give a stake in the project to the person if he/she would see it through. If you know any people who would be open to that, please let us know

This won't solve getting folks to your site, but will definitely help in getting them to actually download your app - make sure the first thing your site does is spell out the benefit to the customer.

Coming to your site, it was pretty clear how I could interact with the site, but not why I should bother. It might be obvious to you, since you've worked on it, but it's not to a casual browser. Compare to https://www.gotinder.com/ which works hard to clearly sell the benefit of the service.

I thought the concept was pretty clear from their site.

One suggestion I have is to interface the app with Facebook and/or Twitter accounts. For example, once you take and post a selfie in the app, it can post a message on your Facebook/Twitter profile letting that user's friend's know that, not only can they rate their friend's attire, but also help spread the word of your app.

If you already have this feature, you should definitely display it on your site.

This functionality is there, of course. We had it displayed, but people we showed it to were basically screaming to reduce the amount of text, so we cut it out, since that should be a given.

I'm not so sure I agree with the approach of treating your users as somebody that has the attention span of 2 seconds and after that mindlessly wanders off somewhere else, but that seems to be the general advice.

I've tried objectively looking at Tinder's website and I don't think I'd realise what the app is about unless they were as ubiquitous as they are now. If you try to forget what the app is about and go to the page, what would your impressions of the app and its functionality be?

Or Instagram, which does none of that?

Personally, I wouldn't download a style app that wasn't itself stylish. It'd be hard to recommend to my stylish friends. And something like this will take off via word of mouth and community building.

Right now, afaik, the leader in this space is Pinterest. You could do the same sort of thing Instagram did to Facebook--be the indie alternative that the cool kids use. But IMO you need more of that cool kid mojo. I'm not quite sure how to get it... brilliant designers and product people are hard to find. Maybe you are brilliant, but haven't put enough time and polish into the product yet.

This same obstacle is waiting for you on <every other product you will ever build> and is what differentiates successful products/companies from the also-rans so don't just give up, persevere and try anything you can think of until something sticks or you run out of ideas/opportunities/passion for it.

It's okay to fail after you've tried everything, but if you quit now to build something new you're just aspiring to get back to this point equally unprepared to take your idea from launch to success.

    but if you quit now to build something new you're just aspiring to get back to this point equally unprepared to take your idea from launch to success.

This is a very good point, thanks! So, even if things don't work out, we can use this project as a learning project to learn about marketing.

We've tried running some ad campaigns, but those things are terribly expensive and inefficient, around $5 per user gained, which is around the industry standard.

I think Sam Altman touched on this masterfully when he wrote about how critical it is to have people tell their friends about your app/startup/whatever. Their reaction to it is the ultimate test of whether you built something anyone would give a damn about. Even in a hyperconnected world, there is still no substitute for word of mouth. Even though his advice is geared more towards full out startups, I think it applies equally well in this case. You really need to wow people with your product.

Working backwards from Sam's thesis, it seems the most logical first step would be to get your app in front of as many "real" people as possible. Show it to your friends, family, coworkers, your mailman, your mechanic, the dude sitting beside you at Starbucks. My 2 cents anyways...

>Even in a hyperconnected world, there is still no substitute for word of mouth.

Word of mouth is rarely authentic in the beginning. The key is to be able to plausibly manufacture it without being accused of spamming to any significant degree. AirbBnB, for example, got their start by spamming anyone that posted a listing for a rental property on Craigslist [1]. Flappy Bird was very likely "growth hacked" with fake downloads and reviews until it went viral [2]. Facebook's success essentially boils down to a contact importer that, especially in early incarnations, made it far to easy to accidentally spam hundreds of friends with invites to the service.

The reality is that while a good product is a prerequisite for something eventually having viral success, every tech success that I am aware of (except for Google perhaps), up to and including Facebook, has built their empire on spam and TOS violations. If you want to be successful, build something that plausibly fits into these kinds of tactics and spam away.

[1] http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-do...

[2] http://nativex.com/blog/the-story-behind-why-flappy-bird-was...

This.

The backbone of all effective marketing is product. Period. Your first goal is to identify who, exactly, wants your product, and who wants it the most. You do this by getting the product in the hands of as many objective, unaffiliated users as you can -- ideally without spending too much money doing so.

Not everyone will dig it, and that's fine. If you find yourself in a situation where everyone tells you they love it, something is either ridiculously right (highly unlikely) or nobody is really, really telling you the truth.

You'll want to have a hypothesis in mind as to whom you're targeting -- start by identifying and sampling among these people. But don't be afraid to consult total randoms. The key is to seek objective feedback and observe actual usage.

Also, think of your hypothesis testing the way a scientist would. In some respects you are seeking disconfirming evidence, not confirming evidence. If you seek feedback with a conscious bias towards confirming your preconceived beliefs, you risk "leading the witness" and nudging people down the path you want them to. You also risk overcounting the positive feedback and emotionally discounting the negative feedback.

Once you believe you've found evidence of a core user group, stick to that group and overservice it. Be the absolute best solution for that group. Kill it with that group. Just be...absurdly, undeniably awesome for it. Then play around with referral hooks, mechanics, and incentives. This is how you sew the seeds of word of mouth.

A word on gauging positive user feedback: when someone really loves your product, you'll know. They will be begging you to let them know when and how they can get it. Genuinely positive feedback is usually very enthusiastic. Beware of "meh" feedback disguised as positive feedback. Remember: you are seeking awesome.

Thank you both for the feedback!

We've tried feeling the water with with /r/femalefashionadvice and the feedback was rather positive, that's what keeps us going still.

I have a feeling that feedback from total randoms might even be more beneficial, as feedback from your friends will probably be heavily biased, and, simply because they're your friends you share a lot of things in common, the sample will be much better.

Also, sometimes you just have to power through it and do it better than others. If we take Instagram as example, I have a feeling that a lot of their friends would have told them "why do that, there's already Hipstamatic that does the same thing" (at least that was my experience often), but they found their following online.

There is a lot of bad advice in this thread so let's start with the beginning:

1. Why did you create this app and how is it different than your competitors? Do you know what your competitors metrics are?

Taking a quick look at your app, it looks very similar to The Hunt. So I would research who the hunts customers are and go after them. I would also research (i.e. App Annie) The Hunts downloads and revenue numbers and keywords.

2. App Store is very difficult for discovery. How do you envision users finding your app? Is it intent driven or not?

This will help you refine the marketing channel. If you want to buy ads, be very precise and use it to learn more. For example, spend $1-$3 per day and use it to figure out search terms, demographics, intent or not, etc. At this stage you are doing customer research and not performance marketing.

3. Seeding content.

You're going to have to do a lot of work to make it not seem like a dead zone. So invest tons of time on content creation.

4. Once you have the content, expose it. Look into deep links, referrals, etc. You can connect SEO efforts but it will take time to start ranking and you'll have to have a plan and think long term.

Not sure why the parent post was downvoted - there's a lot of good advice here.

I agree with all the points listed. Knowing your competition is a very big deal. And knowing how they market (even if it's not how you would) is very smart. There are various services out there that can help you with competitive analysis from competitors ads (What Runs Where) to backlinks (Ahrefs) to other seo aspects (Sem Rush). They're all not cheap for a reason, but usually provide a free test drive.

As for the App Store, you really need to look into ASO. Probably the majority (or a good chunk) of apps on the App Store do not do any sort of optimization or planning. Check out Sensor Tower or App Annie for more on this.

Content. This is a must. You can drive traffic to your site if you can be perceived as an authority. (Well, that, and you actually are into what you talk about - you have to be genuine in this regard.) Check out Brian Dean's Backlinko for tons of great strategies that you can use to boost your content marketing. Start blogging/posting and creating content your users will find interesting and will keep them coming back.

You're going to have to tie all this into social as well. The two biggies (of course) are FB and Twitter. G+ also probably won't hurt. You'll have to spend time engaging on this level if you want to drive users to your site.

Ads can work too, but are a little tougher since they will require money up front. But, despite what some people may say, you can drive traffic to your site for a few dollars a day. I have been doing this on google for a long time. Set your daily budget to $2/$3 and see what keywords perform. Tweak these and keep adjusting. It is not a ton of traffic, but once you can get cheap click throughs and then some conversions, then you can grasp how it all works and scale up. $10 a day. $25, etc. Mix all your ad copy too and see which of those performs best as well. I don't usually recommend ads because it's the hardest, but it can also be pretty fun too. YMMV.

Others have also mentioned influencers. My current company has done well with this, but it's a constant process. You don't just get one or two and it's all good. You have to keep pulling in new influencers who can keep the momentum going.

I saw a post earlier and just want to say whatever you do DO NOT DRIVE TRAFFIC FROM FIVERR. This is shit and Google knows. Amazon knows. They all know. Fiverr is ok for logos, voice overs, translation, things like that. But never buy likes or follows or tweets or traffic. It's all junk and will get you no where. I've tested it and Google has never bumped my sites up in rankings using crap traffic.

Lastly, you have to be serious and engaged. Marketing is not luck and it's not just set it and forget. It's dynamic and requires time. Face to face if need be. You need to be clever and resourceful on getting your message out there. It's been said in other posts, but quality traffic and attention (that converts) are the hardest parts to making a product & company successful. You will not figure this out overnight, but you need to stick with it. Measure everything.

Good luck!

I don't know if you have done this already but here are these Youtubers for example that talk about fashion..

Name:Thechicnatural with 833,449 subscribers

Name:Wendyslookbook with 633,000 subscribers

Name: Beautybyjj with 506,000 subscribers and many more..

In their profile, they have business email addresses to contact them. They will charge you a small fee and will mention your app and also include a link to your site for their subscribers to check out.

Tip: Often times, they give away a prize to their subscribers after reaching x amount of subscribers. So find a way to spin that to get their subscribers to your app and maybe get the prize through your site when the time comes?. For the example, the subscribers can sign up on your site, show their fashion sense and then win the prize of that youtuber that has reached their milestone?. Figure it out and it should help. All the best.

This is great advice, thanks! We'll look into it

My general recommendation would be to read Crossing the chasm. Pretty good read. General idea is to solve a problem for a very core group of users (you get that users by just basically hand holding them and signing them up one by one). Once you get 100% satisfaction from them, they'll likely tell their friends in that particular (and very narrow) domain. After winning in a particular domain 100%, only then move on to related domains. Once you get a bunch of domains within a larger set, than you go after that super set.

Your problem here is your going after a rather broad group of people. That's usually pretty nigh impossible unless you got megabucks behinds you. I'd narrow it somewhat and tackle them first. I don't know anything about fashion so I can't help you there.

But if it were, say, an app for people who were buying motorobikes I might first create an app that helped people of a particular brand (indeed, model within a brand) of motorbike as they often congregate and chat amongst themselves quite nicely. Once I completely killed with that brand, I might consider building the same tool for another other brand of motorcycle. After killing a bunch of brands only then would I try to go after the motorcycle market in general.

Yes, I agree. I've realised we might have taken a too large swing with a app like this. My thinking about marketing this is something similar to what you're pointing to - finding a specific subreddit, online group, or even a city to concentrate on and then try to spread out from there

Talk to a few people that you would hope would be ideal users of your app -- ask them about their habits and media they consume to better identify potential channels that you could use to reach similar people.

Your earliest users are most likely to be ones who are already doing activities with regards to fashion -- perhaps check out /r/malefashionadvice on reddit and search for other online interest communities. I would bet there are instagram, pinterest and twitter communities around fashion.

Measure the success of your campaigns across channels, and the retention of users across each. You should decide if you plan to grow users by being 'viral' (fast growth, but user's don't stay long) or 'sticky' (slower growth, longer usage).

Any users you get and keep are likely to be the best advocates and already know similar users, so empower/incentivize them to invite the friends they think would be interested -- ideally in some way that is natural to the product. In the ideal case, the product is so good, they will immediately want to tell their friends who would be interested.

Finding an effective and repeatable marketing strategy can require as much thought and effort as the product itself.

This might sound basic, but it's totally true.

Go to Meetups and talk about it whenever possible.

Move your location to the epicenter of whatever industry you want to build traction in. Fashion oriented -- try New York.

I know of people that have raised money (read $50 investors) for the sole purpose of getting peoples attention.

I'm sure these are not new, but they are routinely passed over.

To be frank, getting eyeballs is by far THE HARDEST PART to launching a business, so explore all avenues.

What is a $50 investor?

"What is a $50 investor"....

Like GoFundMe or KickStarter --or the thousand other sites that have copied their business model.

Some people use fundraising in really small amounts as a way to get early adopters or crusaders for their mission.

Thanks! We've been sticking to some traditional (boring) methods, such as ads and trying to contact some content creators and influencers.

So, you'd recommend trying more person-to-person or "guerilla" marketing tactics?

Consider starting a Instagram/Twitter/Facebook/blog containing war stories of "fashion disasters averted", "fashion winners", etc, and then hash-tag it to high hilt with tags that various likely customer groups use. Build a follower list and convert to app users from there.

I love this.

But I do think that you are missing a trick: you are pushing the wrong end of the proposition.

If this does fly it will fly not because you are offering a free appraisal of what users are wearing but more because you are giving users the opportunity to flex their fashionista status.

What you might want to do is create a panel of informed and preferably well known gurus to critique the uploaded selfies.

Go the X-factor for style route:

Your top tier of acknowledged experts critique the style 'performances'.

The 'judges' reactions to the style performances might be good or bad in the general but often enough your going to get a performance that has the potential to go viral: fb, buzzfeed, national press whatever.

Follow through on the personal aspect of these stories and create compelling narratives:

"OMG I totally took on board what (take in name of top stylis at Looks Good) told me about my style. I did what they told me and landed my dream date/job/ etc."

If you have any promotional cash to spend use it to recruit a panel of top stylists. Or if your bold enough take the roles on yourselves and spend the money on clothes/ haircuts.

In short feed awesome stories to the major players with big audiences and hope that a few stick. Obviously always point the origin of the story straight back to the app.

Good luck!

PS: Final Para: A simple yes or no from you could prevent them from making a mistake or give them encouragement they need.

Should read: A simple yes or no from you could prevent them from making a mistake or give them the encouragement they need.

Everything you said here sounds great and it's opportunities like that that keep us going. We have lots of ideas where this thing could go, for instance partnering with retail stores and literally having Looks Good integrated in wardrobe fitting areas, to be able to quickly check before a purchase.

However, everything stops with the fact that we basically have zero users now.

Thanks for taking the time to answer, and for the correction, we'll fix it!

You are very welcome.

Be outrageous and have fun.

If you need any help your copy reach out, I'm happy to help.

Let me think on the user acquisition issue, I'll ping you via your site.

Please do! you can also find us at contact at getlooksgood.com

I've had similar issue with my opensource tool. What I tried so far was posting at social sites where the niche users hang out. That includes Hacker News, reddit, twitter, various forums, slack groups, product hunt, stackoverflow, etc. I tried to do it in a meaningful way where I pointed out how my tool actually solved problems for the users in question. After that, some users decided to write blog posts about my tool, which in turn generated more traffic. In my opinion this generates quality user traffic, but isn't gonna do too much if you are looking to create a brand out of your name :(

This is just my two cents and I'm not the most fashionable guy on the planet so your mileage might vary!

Personally, I wouldn't use it because, based off of your site, it looks like I either get yays or nays on my outfit. A nay on its own will only make me feel bad about myself, but it won't help me improve.

I'd be more into an app where I could get, "No!! Try a different tie. Bright orange looks horrible with that suit."

Of course, the downside is that then I'd be less tempted to rate others - just judging my behaviour on this site, I'd usually rather just up/down vote than explain why!

We've had countless discussions on these exact topics. We've included the ability to post comments and it would be fantastic if the comments were as specific as that. We've tried to think of a system where there are predefined answers as "Lose the ____" or "Love the ____" but that's very hard to get right, especially since you have no users to test how they're using your app.

Maybe we should make the fact that you can post comments known on the site. Thanks!

Thanks for telling me that - I'm just a sample of one, but that makes your app very useful to me. :)

Congratulations on getting this far and good luck in the future!!

Imagine how does a typical user acquisition and engagement happen. A prospect who is looking for feedback on their clothes comes across your app from a blog article or an ad, downloads it and requests for feedback. But then, you don't have many others to provide feedback - the result is that the user (who you may have acquired through content marketing or ad) stops/uninstalls your app.

So before I take up any of the other marketing ideas, I would first work on building a viral element to the app. Is there a way for me to publish this selfie along with a request to rate on Facebook? Or is there a unique URL that I can share on my twitter or even SMS to my friends? If this is in place, what I will do is that once I install the app and take a selfie, I would share it on Facebook or twitter and ask my friends to rate. Now my friends interested in rating would download the app, rate me and possibly go on to use it themselves. Now, I have a "friend network" within the app I will engage with every time I need fashion advice.

Once this is in place, I would identify all people in my Facebook network who will find such an app useful and ask them for feedback - this way, you kickstart usage within your network.

Parallely, I will also start talking to influencers on Facebook/Youtube, etc. and maybe even pay them to share their selfies.

Without a viral element, all the effort you put into marketing will come to nought.

Yes, you can post on FB with a unique link that will show you a Web interface. However, the point of the app would be to get feedback quickly, so the fastest way would be from other people using the app right now

You can't reach that level of engagement without starting through other avenues.

Talk to fashionistas on Twitter. If they promote you to their lists of followers, you have your bootstrap.

Shameless plug: my company provides a service that might be of assistance. In a nutshell, we have a network of several thousand beauty and fashion enthusiast who make videos about products like this. There is no charge for the service, so it fits your budget.

We don't have a category for mobile apps yet, but I suspect a lot of our users would love this product. We could find a way to make it fit.

Contact me at me@derekscruggs.com if you're interested in learning more

If you don't mind me asking, what's your company's main source of revenue since you don't charge for this service?

Normally we charge fees around access to the network as well as analytics, but in order to promote the service and prove its value we have made it free through the end of the year.

Just some marketing/image sorta opinion:

Your marketing uses a lot of exclamation marks and you do that "blah?Blah?Blah?...BLAH!" cliche. Basically it has a phoney and sorta contrived tone to it. This might be a bigger deal than usual because your audience is fashion conscious and these sorts of subtle indicators of inauthenticity and fake enthusiasm will turn them off. Along those lines, your blog says "The fashion season is back" and that just doesn't make sense and spoils your credibility. One thing I've learned from fashion people is they would much rather say nothing than say something "off".

I know a few really smart people who work in the fashion industry and they can read how confident and authentically styled a person is in a quick glance. I'm wondering if your lack of expertise in the fashion world is showing through and turning away people with a trained eye for style. I think as far as that goes, your best bet would be to market your app more authentically. Go with a silicon valley/genius/geeks (don't use the word geek though) sorta approach. Fit the narrative of other connecting apps they know like Uber (innovative) or tumblr (quirky/self-aware). Don't pretend to be part of the fashion world, be honest about making a tool useful for people into fashion. Don't claim to be the best dressed community if you aren't.

Just be confident and "do you"... Ironically the same advice I'd give your users.

In a way it feels like you've picked one of the hardest demographics to pitch something at. People who want to be fashionable but don't have the confidence yet to do it on their own. So they are timid, afraid to take chances and worried that if they make a wrong choice in presenting themselves that it will actually matter.

Anyways, best of luck.

You're looking at this wrong. "Get users to the page" is what you want. Who are the people you expect to benefit from this, and what do they want? I promise you, they aren't saying, "Gosh, I want to be gotten to a page because I am eager to install new apps!"

My suggestion:

Take some time and describe exactly what you think your earliest adopters have in common. These are people who you think will get extraordinary value from your app, the ones who will become incredibly devoted because you are just what they have been looking for, because you are solving a problem they have tried solving for themselves.

Now that you have a notion about who your customer is, go talk to them. Book 30 minute interviews with as many of these people you can. Before you meet them, be vague; just say you're thinking of work on a fashion-oriented app. Start out with very broad questions, so you can get to know them as individuals. Ask about behaviors around fashion. Ask them about problems they regularly experience. Ask them about apps they use, and how they use them in fashion-related ways. Only at the end can you ask them if they have the particular problem you have in mind or show them your solution.

If you do ~25 interviews, you should start to find out a) whether your imagined customer exists, b) who they are, and c) whether some of them feel substantial pain around the problem you are trying to solve. Odds are you will discover you need to pursue a different problem or a different solution. But that's ok; most startups have that experience at some point.

When you find the right problem and solution and are delivering a lot of value to passionate early adopters, then you can start worrying about other users. At that point you'll probably know your audience well enough to have plenty of ideas, but if not, return to interviews. Talk to people about the apps they use, how they learned about them, and what make them go to the trouble of getting started. You'll come up with a bunch of strategies that you can try out on your audience.

And I should add that what I'm describing here is basically the standard Customer Development approach that's part of the Lean Startup method. There's a good mailing list for it here:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lean-startup-circle

Although I cannot say I've tried this since my products have been very niche, you could always try to come up with ten possible reasons why people might not care about your service, list them on a questionnaire, and then run them using an Online survey service (such as TolunaQuick or SurveyMonkey). This could aid in telling you what areas of your offer are lacking the most. It would cost at least a few hundred, but it's better done earlier than later.

On a side note, be sure that your questionnaire is balanced and doesn't lead respondents to answer in the way that you want them to. Remember: The goal is to improve your product, not to pat yourself on the back. Don't let your ego get the better of you.

Read Paul Graham's essay about Want to Start a Startup and go to the section named Airbnb[1]

1: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

What you really need to do is prioritize distribution highly as your are thinking about product ideas. Building the product and then thinking about distribution is the wrong approach.

Next, you need a good product idea. My immediate impression is this probably doesn't qualify.

But since it's built, I'd do things like see if you can get exposure through Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram etc. Try to find some trendsetters willing to use and talk about the product. Seed it to a college or high school.

Crowdsourced fashion likes? Catalogs are full of beautiful people dressed beautifully, but you rarely get to see those outfits on normal folks. +1

Wow, thanks, that's great to hear!

Figure out where your customers are, go to them and tell them about the product. In your case it should be pretty easy ...

Read Traction Book to install a better framework of 'marketing' in your head, then go from there.

Partner with indirectly related products, services, websites, bloggers in your space. Reach out with a carrot to many of them - and there are _many_ - some of them will likely want to work with you.

You'll likely need to offer something tantalizing in return...

Hire a PR person and/or a SEO/Online Marketer. You have heard the phrase you must spend money to make money I'm sure. The trick is to do the part you are really good at, and pay someone else to do the part you are not really good at.

They're bootstrapping a spare time hobby project. Why would you recommend spending money on consultants at this stage?

Having done this, I'd say this is a not a good idea if they are bootstrapping. They are better off learning SEO themselves than dropping a few thousand dollars on a service that cannot guarantee results.

Thanks for the advice! That would be great, of course, but as others have mentioned here, we're the bootstrappiest of bootstrapers, so that's not an option for now unfortunately.

This seems like a HotOrNot focused on fashion / learning how to be fashionable. IMO you need to get club chicks tapping on this app while they are taking a Lyft home.

Try /r/malefashionadvice on Reddit. There are several fashion advice groups on Facebook as well.

We've had them on our radar for a while, thanks! We've been looking for a group like that to concentrate on and try to spread out from there

Full disclosure: I work for a company that does user acquistion for applications.

That being said, we got into the business because an app the company had invented was too hard to market, so we started marketing apps. There are a lot of techniques in this space -- some low budget, some high(er) budget. Happy to chat if you like. Feel free to dm me @jtm on twitter.

1. Buy ads. 2. Do PR. 3. Talk to people. 4. Have your first users refer the product to others. 5. Do partnerships. ...

Marketing is easy.

Read 'Growth Hacker Marketing'.

The only thing "growth hacked" about that book is its Amazon reviews. It's mediocre at best.

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