Hacker News Reader

Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

How about starting by getting some target users using it and seeing whether they spread the word and recommend it to their friends?

The rest is all very nice, but a bit OTT for an alpha launch. Not putting down your work at all, but anything that hasn't got real users yet is probably still a long way from being worthy of being officially "launched".

If you media-blitz and overhype it and it's not ready, you'll end up pulling a Cuil and losing most of your target audience on day 1.

Once you have a few hundred normal users who are telling you your product kicks ass, then think about marketing. Until then, focus on getting your product right.

View on HN

I sometimes read things like this and wonder if I should honestly take them seriously or not.

Cuil did great on the PR front. Sure, their product wasn't all that wonderful, but getting that much attention even if lackluster is something most startups can only dream of.

We're in a similar situation to the poster, but since we're B2B our "testing" basically means working with two customers. We're planning on launching with as much hooplah as we can raise when our demo site goes live in the near future.

There's a lot of power in a launch; it's your chance to get it right and get some attention. At no other point early in the startup will you have as much momentum to getting PR attention. If you can pull it off reasonably it's a great chance to catapult your startup a good ways down the road.

I totally agree. There is a lot of power in the launch. That's why you should only use it once you have something that can actually impress then tens of thousands of people who'll come and have a look.

You say Cuil did a great job on the marketing. Yes, they did. However, most people who went and tried Cuil had a bad experience. That compares very unfavourably with Google, which is unflinchingly brilliant. Result? Sure, Cuil did great by getting (say) a million people to try them on the first day. But of that million, maybe a thousand will actually use them more than once.

It's not really worth going through all that PR work if your stick rate is only 0.1%. Unless, of course, the whole thing was about investors / buyers, not about users (which I believe is the case).

Thanks, The plan (and more) that I am outlining on blog is something we are planning to follow in stages. not in one day. So it will be as you are suggesting.

I have had it testing from some eBay sellers already, but certainly having it testing from couple of hundred users will help a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com