Comment by JoeEntrepreneur | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoeEntrepreneur | Hacker News Reader

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JoeEntrepreneur

Well Onista (http://www.onista.com) is a social marketplace where anybody can buy or sell anything and also socialize, create friends and never worry about paying any listing fees, commission, auctions. It would be very simple.

I was reading this article about "8 Simple Steps to Build Traffic For Your Internet Startup" @ http://www.scoreboard-media.com/internet-startup-traffic/ and was trying to understand, but some of the stuff I could not really follow. Like "What is defensible traffic". Also it says "Build links". But then how to build links? I do not mind spending money on having Press Release, but I do not know when is the right time to have one, and also who can assist me in writing a press-release. (My Written English sucks more than MC Hammer's accountant).

When you said, "end your beta announcement mail to, say, 10 people or 50 people". Should those be my friends and contacts or I can buy email list from somewhere. No Idea. I already sent email to my friends and contacts and so far 29 ppl have signed up to see when I release the product.

I was giving the initial email idea as an example. I think it's an interesting way to launch a social networking site. It gives you an early way to measure the appeal of the site and the effectiveness of one of the social networking aspects.

I don't think I would bother with a press release, unless you're launching something huge and you have the capital to back it up (e.g., a scalable system and people ready to go). I was just putting that out there. It sort of goes against the web model, anyway.

Having people give email addresses is one approach, but that realy only serves to give you a way to make a targeted announcement. Good, but not great. Having the site up and running is the crucial step. By the 80-20 rule, the last 20% of the features takes 80% of the time. Getting a product out the door is hard.

Once it's up, people will judge it pretty quickly, I think. They will look at it, judge it cool and come back, or judge it harshly and never come back again. Sometimes you get a second chance. If the product can be rapidly improved and you can maintain some buzz, then those lost users may see a reference to it and give it another try.

Thanks Lucas. You have been very helpful.

I guess I shall see when I launch it about what happens. Onista is HUGE application and I do not want to release it with any less features than originally planned. Just my UI Mockup is 200 pages. (just giving you idea on how big the application is). Onista being huge application, it has lot many features, so I believe that users will and will not like some features, but they will have lots of them to choose from.

Thanks again.

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