Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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Rather little How in the How To here. That's unfortunate.

Here's my top five:

1) SEO and AdSense. Learn 'em. Really, this could be points one through five.

2) Focus your marketing attention on the pain point your software/service addresses and how their lives will improve as a result of using it (benefits), not on what your software/service does (features).

3) Instrument freaking everything and remove anything which causes more people to fail at whatever the core task of your application is. If you do this, you will find places where your view of the world is so different from your users' that you could not possibly predict what their issue would be. e.g. for the significant percentage of your users who think Google is the Internet.

4) Email is the single best way to maintain your relationship with someone when they're not on your site, which is most of the time.

5) About 1 million people Tweet. Some 3 millionish people subscribe to Techcrunch. Twenty million voted for Ross Perot. Please recalibrate your understanding of what broad mainstream appeal is.

My article is in no way focused on "how to" attract normals. This is simply an opinion piece on why you should focus on Normals rather than techies and early adopters. I just saw this post on Hacker News and I did not select the title. :)

D'oh, you're right. I didn't even see your H1 tag -- my brain mentally skips them on the assumption they match the HN title, as is the case 99.99% of the time.

In addition to your rationales, which I largely agree with, I'm sort of partial to "People who are normal pay money for things, even things not made by Apple, even in prices above $1.99."

Totally agree with that. Normal folks are happy to drop $10-25 or more a month for products that they like, enjoy, need, etc. While a lot of my entrepreneur friends are pretty stingy when buying products and things online unless they really need them. It's quite comical, because most of us sell products online. :)

This is a fascinating statement, and I have found it to be very true in the sample space I have seen. My hypothesis is that a large number of entrepreneurs tend to be highly analytical, and therefore focus on value and utility. Most people though tend to spend money due to an emotional response, and therefore are happy to make the purchase.

I agree with the point that aarghh made. I also believe it stems from the idea that "that site isn't that complicated; I could do that myself--why would I pay someone $X per month for something I could do myself?" Unfortunately, if you're a software developer, that covers most everything on the Internet.

I changed the title to "why you should" though I do think there's a lot of "how to" in the article - just not in the typical list form that makes how to articles digestible.

Just to clarify, did you mean AdWords where you said AdSense?

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