On the whole, the best ways to get attention are the honest ones: to make something so good that people spontaneously tell their friends about you, and to impress bloggers so much they want to write about you. This is especially true for YC cos, because we like to fund people whose strength is in building things, rather than marketing them.
I will then tell a few of my contacts, and in a single day, the software joe recommended could easily reach 20 people. On the second day, those 20 people will probably spread it further.
Good software needs seed marketing. You need to get the news out initially, after that people will recommend it. What one should do is add features or design around a philosophy that makes personal recommendations easy.
Marketing is not neccessary if you design with marketing in mind. If your app does not get recommended it's because you've not reached your goal yet.
You're not cool enough for Joe to call me and say - hey Max, check out what I just found...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116557
About marketing in general:
I would only care whether the right people are interested, not any random person.
For instance, I'd rather target small businesses who are in a hurry and need to get things done rather than, say, young kids with tons of spare time and no money to spend. To target them with their online games, Blizzard Entertainmnent had to create special "gift card" type time cards that you can buy in stores with cash because much of the people they're going after don't have credit cards.
So, start by building a product meant to appeal to people with $$$ first.
2) Seed early to this group and use them as a sounding board. Build a relationship with them. Focus on solving problems for this user base first.
3) Figure out a way to drive and capture the enthusiasm of this group and leverage it outside when you launch. Your PR will not just point to a product, but a social group using your product in a compelling way. Your feature list is now a benefit story.
Once you get their support you can put your small budget behind the stories they are telling around your product.
(with the notable exception of: "make an incredibly useful product")
Indeed, the notion of "make something awesome and it will market itself" is a useful heuristic for guiding a deeper, sustainable marketing strategy. It's a meritocracy out there, folks, especially in terms of media.
("Media" meaning the layer of communication that connects services and users)
That media you create also needs to stand alone as useful information. Traditional PR is based on leveraging connections ("beating the meritocracy") on behalf of clients to expose a product to an audience. One business strategy equivalent of this might be Facebook forcing users to return to Facebook.com to reply to an inter-profile message; it's unnecessary coercion that ultimately degrades the quality of the product.
I advise businesses to begin creating an unfair advantage that is based on the preexisting expertise of the management team. Toyota's marketing channel within Twitter Japan and Miller Brewing's BrewBlog.com are stellar examples of how you can begin to create a marketing channel that attracts attention on its own merit (and has great SEO effects...and scales like a mother).
There's a number of other issues to grok here, including viral mechanisms and transparent outreach tactics, that I unfortunately don't have time to get into at the moment.
I did get into some of this a little bit on my blog here:
http://www.ethanbauley.com/post/34550190
Great question!
Someone asked a specific question about marketing. If there is an essay by pg related to this, then link to the article or STFU.