How to Get Your First 1,000 Customers
backblaze.com
backblaze.com
And that's the reason folks why people follow-up. People might share a deep repulsion towards them and until recently, even I abhorred the idea. But, I have seen people I emailed respond a few weeks after I sent a follow-up—the point when I assumed I am pestering and the other guy is getting infuriated. My email wasn't about selling something, it was a small question around someone else's work but the general principle applies.
I am not courageous—salesman-type courageous—to send more than one follow-up but I have consistently seen people winning big deals in the third or fourth one. It's undeniable that many people will get vexed in the process but there's hardly any salesperson in the world who didn't annoy that many.
I would add:
Getting good PR in premiere outlets will give you so much more than just the first 1,000 customers. It can open the door to all kinds of opportunities, from being invited to speak at the conferences your customers attend, better recruiting, being noticed for partnership and business development deals, an being top-of-mind if you start looking for funding.
Embargoes are a tricky logistical detail, if you're using one, you don't want to leave any room for error. So aside from mentioning it in the pitch, also include something like "Embargoed until 4/13/17 at 8am California time" in stand-out font at the top of any fact sheet, press release, etc. that you share with the journalist and be sure to mention it in all your confirmation emails.
Once you get awesome PR, figure out the best way for it to live on your site going forward. I see lots of startup landing pages these days with logos like TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal, etc across the bottom but no links to said articles. I can understand why, for conversion rate optimization, you may not want to include the links on your landing page. But for ultimate credibility and (possibly SEO juice) consider having a separate section on your site for press where the actual links to the articles can be found.
If you don't have these then getting your dream journalist to cover your launch will depend very much on how compelling a story you're able to craft around your product and the impact it will have. Don't underestimate what you're doing but also be very critical about it. I like the simple question mentioned in the Backblaze piece: >be really honest with yourself: if you weren’t involved, would you care?
Surely a productivity app launch can't be that interesting for news.
This is exactly my challenge: I'm launching a todo list app soon. Thankfully, I have a potentially interesting story to tell:
"Matterlist: an angry Russian writes a 300-page spec, spends 3 years to create a perfect Wunderlist replacement".
(BTW, I'm a happy Backblaze customer since their launch. Thanks guys, you're incredible!)
Sometimes though when things are really interesting but long I'll go back, upvote and then continue reading to prevent it from dropping off the page.
This is especially true if it is a story from /newest
Also with a few web sites I might upvote it first and then read it :-|
I can neither confirm nor deny that I do this too but I can say that I think it makes sense to do this, and I would go as far as to say that I think it's healthy for the HN community that stories get upvoted by people who have not yet read the story in full, as long as it doesn't happen too much -- while a story might turn out to be lacking or even factually incorrect in some way I think there is opportunity for interesting discussion to be had as long as the topic at hand is interesting.
https://medium.com/@mobitar/how-to-get-your-first-100-users-...