Ask HN: How do you market your software startup/app?
Also, if possible, please throw some light on the marketing tactic which has benefited your startup/app the most.
1. Initial external paid marketing (in the form of Adwords campaigns, email blasts, facebook ads, affiliate programs, etc).
2. Reworking the product until the "viral coefficient" is higher than 1.0. The viral coefficient(aka "k-factor" or "k value"), is basically just the likelyhood that one existing customer will refer another customer. So if your k-factor is above 1.1 for a given period, your initial userbase will grow over each period with no additional marketing needed.
In practice however, few startups ever reach a k-value of 1, so many rely on a combination of virality and traditional paid marketing in perpetuity.
Also, for external marketing, it doesn't have to be paid. It could be in the form of time investment in content marketing and other forms of inbound (of course that's if you don't pay someone else to do it).
2. Nobody said it "has to be" paid. The OP asked how "you" market your startups, and I told him what the companies I've worked with have done, in my experience.
1. "likelyhood [sic] of 1" means 100% probability. Any likelihood over 1 is by definition impossible.
2. I assumed by "there's usually two parts" and "external paid marketing", you meant people have to pay for marketing. I added my personal experience to the conversation that it's not necessarily the only option.
1. If you'd simply read the link (which you clearly have not done), you'd understand that a k-value of 2.0 means that each customer referred an average of 2 new customers. I never said "probability". You did. Yes, probability above 1 is impossible, which is why I never used that word. You clearly conflated the two, which is your error, not mine.
Here's why I said "likelyhood" (likelihood) instead of "probability": http://stats.stackexchange.com/a/2645
"...the likelihood function does not obey the laws of probability (for example, it's not bound to the [0, 1] interval). "
2. Reading-comprehension. It's not that hard.
(x)^n
x being # of people you're able to reach (sorry for the nondescript language), and n being how many people each of those persons will share that tool.
Obviously, whatever endeavor you undertake should seek to maximize n. And it would also be good to aim for low cycle time.
It's implication is that the first step to marketing the app begins with getting a first iteration of the product in front of people and then taking their feedback and then improving the product and repeating the process.
Good luck.