Now here's a company that's solving a real problem. Great going guys.
The challenge that we have is to find a way to reach these scientists. They rarely, if ever, read techcrunch or hacker news and the standard publications in that space have a long publication cycle.
Ideas to reach out to life-science researchers welcome! One guerilla thing we did last week was to get coffee sleeves with "Quartzy, Caffeine for you Lab". We went to the coffee shop near the research buildings at Stanford and put in these sleeves next to the milk and sugar!:)
Also, maybe ask around and join their groups, forums, discussions, or any place you can go to reach your target market.
Sweeten the announcement of your service with something like a "messiest lab cabinet" contest for lab students to photograph their lab cabinet and send it in. The winners get something free, and you get tons of publicity for the product.
Last: advertise on phdcomics.com. If there's one forum that reaches every single graduate student in the country, it's PhD Comics.
We did bring out an ad in Nature a few months ago but the response was underwhelming. The thing with marketing for a startup, we have painfully discovered, is to try non-traditional approaches. Basically something that the other big companies with tons of money are not doing because they are either afraid of looking silly or would think that it would not work... Doing the expected thing doesn't work because it gets priced up to the point that it does not make financial sense.
For example, at a recent conference we had a very simple booth. Other large established companies had these giant booths that needed cranes with espresso machines and what not. The only thing we did was put out a scrabble board and gave out a Quartzy t-shirt every hour or so to the one with the largest score in that hour. We had a line of people waiting to play the game. So silly stuff like scrabble leader-board got people's attention.
btw, scrabble because Quartzy is the highest scoring opening word in Scrabble!
Conferences have been decent, but good old word of mouth is where we are seeing our biggest success. The trick (for me at least) is being able to plant enough seeds to get the word going.
I actually work on a start up in this space with a slightly different approach - aggregating the best deals on supplies directly from vendors.
If you ever want to bounce ideas around feel free to contact me (email in profile).
It seems that many researches frequent that subreddit.