Does a compelling product just do the magic by itself, or do you need a marketing plan? What strategies do you have to "bring the good news"?
1. Make it so good people want to tell others about it. It can't be an "hmm, yeah I guess that might be useful later. I'll bookmark it". It has to be a "Woahhhhh I've been looking for this exact thing for years. So have my friends I bet. I need to use this now, and tell my friends what I found". (A hard ask, but it's nice to aim for that 'wow' factor).
2. Make the base product free, and politely refuse donations. Ask people to simply tell their friends about it. I think people kinda feel guilty about having a cool product for free, so they become evangelists for it, and help you sell it.
Having said that, it's good to get something to start off. Look at websites/domains that are related, and have been neglected... Send emails, make an offer, buy domain, get traffic. It's not a sure fire thing - some people still believe domain names to be worth millions whatever they are. But you can pick up some real gems. More likely to be sustainable traffic unlike tc/reddit/etc mentions.
I believe Remember the Milk would fall into this category.
Does anybody know how they're doing? Back in March they said they're up to 500k users. I wonder how many upgraded to the $25 Pro account. Two percent maybe? That would mean $250k in revenues (spread among several people over several years). Just something I was pondering the other day!
- That sounds more like Facebook!
Are you sure that the "hmm, that might be useful" -reaction is not good enough?
If you want to date a girl, you could just approach one after another until one finally says yes (e.g., "My name is George. I'm unemployed and I live with my parents."). Or you could improve yourself by learning how to cook or play music, getting in shape, etc., so you have something to actually bring to a relationship. At that point you'll either be turning them away, or you'll have a life and won't care (which can also be an attractor).
Same approach in the technical world. Do you have a blog? Or do you participate in open source projects, or attend conferences, or anything else to demonstrate how you bring value to others?
Another common path is consulting, which basically accomplishes the same thing. Prove your worth to others, and your goal of introducing a new product becomes much easier.
I think sometimes we may care so much about the end product that we have trouble switching from the techie role to the business role. But you have to save some of that energy for marketing, and it may be better to take a more dispassionate view of the finished product (or risk never releasing anything).
I am working on something right now that started as an idea that popped into my head. I took 6 hours writing the core part of the app, then let it run for a couple days. As I started using it myself, I had that "Ohh!" experience. To me, that's what tells me this can be a very compelling experience and why I'm pursuing further with it.
So if your product is compelling, then you've already gone 80% of the way there. The last 20% is the hard part. Find the audiences that will use what you're building. Demonstrate it for them. Free access, full-on support to your initial base of users, etc. Devote yourself to answering people's questions. You will find that word of mouth happens very easily when people are excited about what you're doing.
When you have introduced it to your core audience, which will be very small to begin with, then look around at media outlets. These days media outlets range from popular forums about the niche you are filling, to blogs and related mass-media publications. Getting on Techcrunch is cool. Its a good way to get some exposure. Hacker News itself is becoming a good place to launch, because the community is still very small and much more devoted to trying new things. I used to get hit occasionally by Slashdot and Digg, and that traffic was good for big spikes, but I would only see about 1-2 percent overall traffic boosts after that overally. However, that was an extra 2 percent I didn't have before.
Now, once you are established and have a small but active user base then you might consider bigger venues for advertising. Buying ads on popular sites like Digg and Techcrunch can help. Its very targeted, which is what you want. If you want some Google juice, oddly enough doing press releases can help. I started a company in the beginning of 2007 and we were paying about $150-$200 for press releases a few times a month. We didn't see huge amounts of direct web traffic, but it was really good for getting the word out. People in the financial industries (who pay more attention to press releases than the rest of us) were talking about us and daily I was seeing our name being talked about in the niche circles we were targeting. The co-founder was invited to interview on a few radio shows, which helped after that. (Sadly the company is defunct now. That's how startups go. However that was not because of the advertising and word of mouth.) Don't spend a ton of money on press releases. If your target audience is general web users, then releasing a press release 4x a month will do bollux for you. If you're targeting businesses, then press releases can be more helpful. But still be careful.
The last thing that I can suggest, is remember your users are "customers" and NOT "consumers". You can always tell a marketing shill versus a true entrepreneur by how they refer to people. Everyone forgets that before the 20th century, consumption meant you had tuberculosis. Then that term got morphed to refer to "the dirty poor masses that buy the rotten horse meat we sell them as hot dogs." I am a customer, a user, not a consumer. Remember that if you treat your potential audience with respect, your users, then they will respect your product and that goes much further than any dollar spent on marketing.
Its amazing that if you put yourself in the right place, or talk to the right people about your valuable product, then its like the virus from "28 days later", it spreads quick.
Chris Co-Founder, Property Stampede LLC
Some might reply, "How many great products can you name that people ignored?" I can name very few, but there's massive selection bias at work; the great products that people ignore are ipso facto ones that most people haven't heard of.
Most natural (word of mouth) Least natural (spam)
most success is probably somewhere in between