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Comment by kyro | Hacker News Reader

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Techcrunch, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Facebook, news.yc, etc. are all extremely effective places to create buzz for no cost.

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Unless you're building the next social news site or a bittorrent client, this is the wrong initial audience for your product. You want to find people that are actually in your target demographic, not the fickle digerati that try 10 new web services a day but never stick around at any of them.

You want your initial customer base to be your target demographic because their initial feedback will help shape future iterations of your product. If you just launch with the web 2.0 social news scene, their feedback will be less relevant and will take your product down a distracting path.

There are also a lot of more specialized communities where you can promote an idea for free amongst the appropriate target market by simply joining a particular corner of the blogosphere, joining certain forums, etc. So this idea may still be applicable.

Then again, if you are producing a website targeting automobile tire wholesalers, no amount of free online promotion is likely to have the desired effect.

I never really thought of the "digerati" as actual users for the product; they're more like "carriers" for a (memetic) disease--they'll talk about it to their non-technical friends, set up their own stuff using it as a platform, and so on.

(Not that I have any idea how the religious book market works, but) if you want to sell Bibles, do you go door-to-door, or do you just go to churches and try to get the preachers to use you as their source? The tech crowd are the preachers to the regular joe user--they're the ones interviewed for tech color pieces in the news, they're the ones deciding what software to install in your schools, libraries, workplaces, and government buildings; they're the ones who set your router filtering policies. If the students in a school can goof off on Facebook but not Myspace, guess which one the school's network will live on?

That's assuming your time is free.

Often, actual cash in hand is more of a limiting reagent than your own time. Since the OP was about minimizing cost, it seems fair to assume that cash in hand is the appropriate limiting reagent.

None of those sites create buzz.

Make your site worth talking about and you don't have to spend any money (at first).

Read "Made to Stick" (great book on the subject of sticky ideas).

its also assuming your site is well-liked enough to get modded up.

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