Marketing Stormpulse: rise early, work hard, strike oil | Hacker News Reader

Marketing Stormpulse: rise early, work hard, strike oil

wensing.tumblr.com

34 pointswensing7 comments

StormPulse's previous article made me question why they've been ignored by VC/Angels despite great traction, and smart founders.

I have a crackpot theory: Silcon Valley doesn't understand weather.

I live in CA too, and "weather" for me is not wearing sandals to work.

The StormPulse founders live in FL, where "weather" is not being able to find your house when you come home from work because it's in a tree a half-mile away.

Meanwhile "The public’s online appetite for weather cannot be overstated. According to a Scarborough Research study, 36.5% of adults went to the Internet for weather info in the past month, behind only e-mail (62.6%) and ahead of news (33.6%)."

I can't wait to see where these guys go . . .

StormPulse's first article - http://wensing.tumblr.com/post/1215873671/bootstrapping-stor...

Quote referenced: http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/390680-Stations_Wea...

It's their job to sell it. Push, not pull.

I know Matt knows this, but you can't expect anyone to care unless you make them care.

Being located in Florida is a liability for VCs and angels, regardless.

You're right that their product has a great "problem slide" built right into the deck: a picture of a tree crushing a house.

I agree completely.

I think these posts will help them tremendously - engaging HN usually leads to good things and having the community help to sharpen the pitch is a great first step.

It's a shame that this post wound up on the second page of HN - probably too many of Matt's fans hitting it early triggering some kind of HN algorithm . . .

So simply summarized Stormpulse's success came because:

    1. They provided a better solution to a problem that people had,
    2. They made the solution easily spreadable via an embedable widget,
    3. Hurricane Ike hit the Gulf Coast.

Two of the three ingredients they had control of, the third was a random event that they were well-placed to take advantage of. People who saw the Stormpulse widget remembered it and searched for it directly, rather than try to use the broken, or inefficient service of other online weather media.

But the third is not uniformly random, it's periodically random. That is, you never know exactly when a bad hurricane is going to form, but you can have confidence it will happen.

I would just add:

0. We got started at the right time.

that doesn't seem to be so much about marketing, but more to do with being viral.

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