Ask YC: How to get your startup noticed by non-techies
How would you go about getting your startup noticed by non-geeks? It's all very well appearing on TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb, but what if this isn't the target audience?
Affiliate marketing. I can never promote this enough. Sign up for PepperJam, Commission Juntion or Sharesale and pay only when you make a sale. Or pay for sign ups.
If your product may interest businesses, then cold call. Or warm call (email then call). Even if your product is free, you can find a few enterprises that may benefit from using it. Call the top dogs, decision makers and tell them how your "new blog/app" is the ISHT and they oughta to stop working and check it out.
Be agressive. Passively.Luck is a "myth" for most people. If someone says no that means "not right now". Keep pushing every other week.
Repeat. If something works, repeat it. Exhaust it.
Try and try more. There is no set way to market or sell. Try everything you can. The beauty of emails or phone calls is that you can be anything you want and anything the other guy/gal wants. "Be water", Be a chameleon.
EDIT: IF you could be more specific about what you do, you could get better advices from readers.
Non-geeks find out about technical stuff via their geeky friends and relatives. Firefox is the perfect example.
The only counter examples I can think of are things like Facebook. However, even here, there is no harm in going after techies, unless your product is one of the few that they won't like.
Techies live in a bubble. Let's be frank - most people don't have a clue what IE is, let alone Firefox. Using early adopters as a gateway to a larger market only makes sense if those early adopters are a subset of such a market.
What if you're selling to say: law offices? Doctors? Accountants? HR Directors? None of these markets fit the geek->masses model. You'll fail miserably if you don't target these niches where they already live.
Also, make it easy for existing users to invite new ones. Better still, design your product to be viral/users bring in other users as a natural consequence of using the product (e.g. PayPal, etc.) This sounds obvious but often isn't done well.
I would look at advertising agencies, they do this stuff for a living. Look at how they sell detergent and cars. It's very lowest-common-denominator stuff, but that's what works. Unfortunately the stuff they do tends to be quite expensive, but learn from what they do.
If you don't have money I would suggest reading up on marketing psychology, there are a lot of tricks, and try out different ad platforms on the Internet monitoring your return on investment through funnels, click-throughs, etc. to find out what works.
Create different ads, viral videos, games, silly websites, and whatever else you can think of. Don't be afraid of "punch the monkey" and "you have just won" ads - they work or they wouldn't be there. You don't have to tell us here on HN you made them ;-)
And don't sell on technological merit, nobody besides techies care about that. Sell on emotion.
but if its a tech product targeted at an audience you can't reach online, be prepared for very low conversion rates from offline forms of marketing.
Just keep focusing your efforts on your product. Make it shine. Make every single part of it wonderful. People will talk about it. That's what happened with Facebook: I remember getting an account when high schoolers were first allowed, and feeling the need to tell all my friends. It had such a wonderful interface. Most of my friends did the same.
Obviously viral will only help you if you have something worth sticking around for. Otherwise you'll just drum up a huge bandwidth spike and nothing to show for it.
Facebook app was the perfect example of getting it right. While it was still novel (rather than annoying) the ability to invite people to use apps (and Facebook) was interesting enough to a lot of people they did share it.
But I've also noticed that non-geeks tend to signup for a lot of junk stuff out of curiosity. Ex: I get mails from a dozen new social networks everyday saying that my friend has signed up and is waiting for me to get on the site (sick).
And forwarded mails(read junk. most are so) are a better examples.
And they won't return anymore if it isn't a good site.
So it should be easy to get people(non-geeks) but if they like it they will surely go on with your site. I teach a lot of old guys around me(includes my father) about how they can use simple tricks to use the internet better. And it goes on spreading among people in their age group and friends circle. And it does so because it isn't boring. If I taught my dad how to get a Merb app running then he would probably be thinking about the next month finances or the flavor for tomorrow morning's coffee.
if you are willing to post more about your startup, i might be able to give you some more targeted ideas.
And include a refer feature that is non-ridiculous.