Getting traction for your startup – how we did it. | Hacker News Reader

Getting traction for your startup – how we did it.

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52 pointsshafqat14 comments

An interesting approach but it sounds like it really boiled down to the backlinks you got as a result of the TC article ... and having an existing (if not extensive) relationship with Arrington. While that's definitely valid it's a combination that's out of reach for most startups.

I would have to say for me personally word of mouth outranks SEO enormously at this (early) point in my startup. To me SEO is about getting every joe typing whatever into Google, word of mouth is securing a lot fewer but a lot more notable users.

Only one significant blog (and only significant to casual game devs) has written anything about me in the month since I posted here asking how guys launch startups. And in terms of link creation ... just scraper blogs stealing that guys content really. But word of mouth has led to some of the biggest names in the industry using my service now.

Backlinks were huge, but I had absolutely NO relationship whatsoever with Arrington, Jason or anyone else in Silcon Valley. I link to post that explains how we got on TC. It's all perseverance and creativity.

But I agree, that word of mouth and passionate users are absolutely essential. You can still get backlinks from these 'notable users' - they have blogs right?

If you have a product with a viral coefficient approaching 1, you'll be all set. But for the rest of us, backlinks and organic traffic give us a steady base of users to test, iterate and get feedback from.

That sounds like pretty decent advice. I have one nitpick though, which is the advice to leave blog comments everywhere and to relentlessly tell all of your friends about your startup.

That surely cannot hurt, but the return on investment of posting comments on a site is minute. I mean, I am addicted to commenting on HN and other sites daily and it is a lot of fun, but the notion that this is actually a good use of time for my startup is wishful thinking.

I would never expect to get a single customer from this. I think getting an article on TechCrunch is of debatable value... but the traffic you'd get from a comment underneath an article from people checking out your profile link is miniscule.

Regarding telling your friends -- again, it doesn't hurt, but it is thinking really small and is not sustainable. That might be a good strategy for winning a minor student council election, but the ROI is going to be utterly negligible. Basically, you could spend a week phoning everyone you know and convince them to check out your site. If you're lucky, this would roughly equal the amount of traffic you would get by having a moderately influential person spend 30 seconds writing a tweet about you.

I disagree, especially about posting comments. When I was running my social "cute" site, I hired my niece to post comments on icanhazcheezburger, and to have cuuute.com in the sig (the site is dead now). I routinely got 2-5 clicks a day from people clicking through her sig.

And, pretty routinely, every time I post a link to my economic social news site, http://newsley.com. I get around 70 clicks. Frankly, the people that come to Newsley from HN give me the best feedback and are my best users. In fact, a large portion of my first 1000 visitors came from HN. I get a lot of bounces, but i also pick up a couple of regular users every time. Granted, the demographic that I'm looking for actually intersects with HN's demographic somewhat.

I can also vouch for leaving links in the body of comments. As long as your link is on topic to the blog post, I really don't have any problem at all dropping a link in a blog comment. I think it can often add to the discussion.

2-5 clicks per day? That would take over a year before you even generated a single CPM!

I dunno, I disagreed with your opinion so much I clicked your name, checked out your site and ended up watching the trailer for your game, just to see the kind of person I was dealing with that had an idea so contrary to my own. If you never made that comment, I would never of known about Overgrowth.

Right, and I am thankful for that. However, my point is that in the entire history of my HN career (which spans many, many hours), maybe 100 people have clicked on that link. Maybe 2 of those 100 people turned around and bought the game (probably quite a generous estimate).

If you do the math, that is approaching $0/hour. It is simply not a good way to acquire customers, nor should it be expected to be.

Fair point, but I never said leaving comments on blogs should be a customer acquisition strategy. If it is, you have big problems!

What I was saying is that leaving commnents on blogs helps you get the initial traction, both in terms of exposure and press coverage. That's it. Once you are past that stage, I agree it's an inefficient use of your time to spend all day combing blogs looking for relevant posts to comment on!

You also tend to be friends with people who are a lot like you, and to be related to people who are a lot like you, but your customers might not be like you at all. (I can't remember the last time I spent time socially with someone who hits my typical customer demographic.)

This is a good point. Our first version of our consumer site was flawed in many ways. But we kept getting positive reinforcement from our friends/family and didnt put it in perspective.

It's important to take a step back and look objectively at all feedback, especially if it comes from a demographic that is not your core customer.

Until you have tried it, don't knock it. They have actually done it and have demonstrable success.

You comment on blogs to engage the existing early adopters of the niche you are targeting to start the process of customer development.

You hit up friends to practice pitching (don't underestimate this) and getting some up front feedback on the cheap to help refine your idea.

I know a lot of this is obvious to some, but I gotten feedback that it's helpful so I thought I'd share with the community.

Bottom line - SEO is your friend when you're looking to build a large, sustainable audience.

Preach it brother!

SEO scales ridiculously out of proportion with time invested, does not typically require dedicated upkeep outside of continuing to execute on the business, can be done without large ongoing payments of money, largely does not depend on pleasing gatekeepers (a task which almost always distracts you from executing on the business), etc, etc.

The OP seemed to credit the number and quality of the backlinks gained as opposed to a SEO strategy per se.

I understand that SEO is vitally important, but for getting high quality backlinks (which in turn generate a more back links) you'll always have to go though, and please, gatekeepers.

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