Press and Viral aren't the only two marketing and distribution strategies

This is one major problem 90% of startups/businesses face. Most entrepreneurs are usually skilled individuals who build products. But what they fail to realize is that now they have to place their product in front of your customers. That is the hard part.

Most startups launch will not be covered by TC, Mashable, RWW....Even when your startup does you cannot guarantee the audience will come back. Why would they? So what does an entrepreneur do?

A few startup entrepreneurs believe they do not need a "business guy" in their team. Well, save the case in which you are building a Google Killer or a super viral app, you do. While you are busy responding to those 50 hard core users and not the 5k who signed up and never came back, the business guy is supposed to be busy creating and/or attracting business.

That one guy should be the one selling your product, looking for distributions deals and spend his time emailing/calling (harassing works too) established players who may be able to take advantage of your product/service. Sales prove your product is worth something. Distribution is another important part of your business. You cannot easily acquire 1 million users, but you can add a tiny value to someone else's 1 million users (Facebook applications). In this case you are usually generating revenue as well. Once you sign one decent deal (and make sure they announce it publicly) other players will follow. "Monkey see , Monkey do".

Hackers can certainly learn to be great negotiators and great business development managers, but usually they do not want anything to do with bureaucracy.

If you are a team of 2 hackers, having a third co-founder or early part time employee as your VP of sales and Business Development will only benefit your company.

I think SEO is one of the best options for product builders to market their products, but it's really only a HUGE win if you have a huge body of content (and a means for that to keep growing). User-generated content + SEO really a viral loop: 100 pages get indexed, which generates X views per day. Eventually, a user creates some new content. Now 101 pages get indexed, increasing the views per day. Rinse repeat, wait for glory. :-)

Of course, for a lot of startups (like RescueTime unfortunately) SEO isn't a huge/viral win (though we still give it a lot of love).

This article reminded me to go buy some Google ads. I just allocated $20 for them and we'll see how it turns out.