Startup Marketing Advice from Balsamiq Studios
balsamiq.com
balsamiq.com
What's great is that you can clearly tell he's just fumbling his way through after reading a few resources here and there, but because he's determined to follow the advice he gets and actually follows through on it, he gets results. He says 20% of the 40 bloggers (including many A/B-listers) wrote something about him just because he asked - that's what it's all about.. walking the (online) streets and spreading your message.
Gah, parroting of anti-VC and anti-TC dogma gets so tired. I think treating both with healthy skepticism is a good idea-- dismissing both outright is just silly.
TechCrunch has covered two startups of mine that didn't have a nickel of funding (neither was in fundraising mode, and both were started with the aim to be a bootstrapped/niche business). They love finding hidden gems, and probably have a pretty fabulous audience for Balsamiq (both bloggers and buyers).
Seriously, people. Set aside the prejudices that startup blogosphere hits you over the head with every day and think for yourself.
It sounds like you didn't want to be written up by TechCrunch more than you didn't think they'd do a write-up on you. If you didn't want to be written up, thats fine, but assuming they only care about VC backed companies and not trying to get thousands of pageviews sounds kind of silly. What would sending them an email have cost you? Your post is amazing, but that's one mistake I think you made.
Despite any bias' TC may or may not have, they are hugely valuable to reach tech bloggers and (if absolutely nothing else) provide SEO value and legitimacy for some buyers. Maybe I'm missing something but, other than the danger of having your servers die under the load, how does it HURT to be covered on TechCrunch?
Oh well, we live and learn...I am doing Balsamiq primarily as a learning experience - learn about having my own business and learn about myself in the process (what my limits are etc).
Today has been a good day in that respect, thanks HN community! :)
You bring up a good point, I shouldn't have prejudices against anyone. I think that my sentence stemmed by my disappointment with a blog which I used to love and have grown tired of lately. I am not anti-VC in general either, they do a lot of good for a lot of people.
Thanks for pointing this out, I'll watch out more closely in the future.
I wish there was a convention in Twitter to flag tweets as advertisements (similar to @ and #). I would gladly use it.
http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/?p=217 for details