Ask YC: What Are Your Biggest Marketing/PR Problems As A Startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: What Are Your Biggest Marketing/PR Problems As A Startup?

26 pointsnathanburke21 comments

I am curious: what are your biggest PR/Marketing problems as a startup? Is it getting noticed? Getting coverage? Differentiation? What problems are startups having when it comes to marketing?

View on HN

Good question. I sent emails on http://uploadthingy.com to about 20 blogs that I thought would be interested a while back - what happened? Nothing. Nada. The service is now profitable and growing every day. Going to try again this week. Not expecting too much. Adwords rules - at least for now.

I wrote a chapter in a book on blogging on how to approach this subject (getting bloggers to link to your project). Here's the short version.

* You'll have a better luck pitching things to people who you have a pre-existing relationship for. Your business has a blog. That blog's purpose in life is to generate pre-existing relationships with people similarly situated to your customers (and, relatedly, to talk about what your customers care about). Talk about what they are talking about and link to their posts. Comment on their blogs. Then, when you email them about your project, you don't get sent straight to the spam box.

* Pitch your product as something their readers will be interested in, with a specifically tuned pitch that reminds them that you are a) already trusted by them and b) know what they want. People almost always end up getting links out of me when they send me an email that demonstrates they really have been reading for as long as they say they have.

* Free licenses are the best money you've never had to spend. Give them out liberally.

* Focus on blogs one step up the social pecking order from you. TechCrunch gets probably a thousand emails a day. Bob's File Format Blog probably gets one every three weeks. Guess which one of these is absolutely dying for anyone to pay attention to them? That's right. This gets you a bit of exposure. Gradually work your way up the exposure chain -- after you get X level of renown, start mailing bloggers at X+1 rather than 10 * X. Get mentioned on the blogs that are read by the bloggers you want to influence and you might not even need to mail them at all.

hey - thanks for all the tips - although it's always easier said than done. Weird how writing code always seems to be the real work - and all this other stuff just - well... you know. Gotta turn it on its head. And: especially like #4 - never thought of that, great idea.

E-mail me, I'll plug you: jem@jemjabella.co.uk

At NewsCred, we got covered on ALL the big technology blogs (Techrunch etc) as well as a lot of mainstream press (NYT, Boston Globe, Reuters, BW etc). That was not the difficult part, although I still owe this community a blog post about how we did it (soon, I promise!).

The hardest part is getting your community engaged, and loving the site so much they will tell their friends. Its getting AdWords users converting into real, long-term members. It's about getting your users to love your site so much that they couldn't live without it.

My takeaway: the media coverage/PR feels great and seems important, but it has nothing to do with the long term success or sustainability of your site. Build something people want and love - that's more important. Get a small, but rabid user base. Get them to spread the love.

Here's an idea: think of a related useful free product or web utility that can draw target users to your site?

Getting web page visitors past the 1st page, and to return - conversions.

Until you solve this, there is little point in trying to get featured on high profile media.

The key might lie in providing social proof (that people actually use your services). If there is none, visitors following links from features won't be very useful. They might be interested enough to check out your landing page (content skimming), but getting the user to slow down and really get familiar with you requires more. It's like channel hopping with tv. You skim through a number of options and see if anything interesting comes up. But the scale of options is different. You might be able to skim through hundreds of websites in one sitting with tabbed browsing. That's not a lot of time per site.

Distribution is and always will be the #1 problem for new web startups.

What exactly are you selling? Our company sells software the SaaS way and distribution has never been as easy!

Distribution in the marketing sense doesn't mean strictly physical distribution of a product. It's the place where you sell it. For most SaaS products the product can only be bought from the company website.

If you sold your SaaS as a white label product or OEM through partners or affiliates, that would be another way of distributing it.

But the traditional marketing concepts, like the four Ps (distribution being the Place), fit better with physical products IMHO.

Well, by distribution, I mean "How do you acquire users / mindshare / customers?"

Marketing, actually. =)

I just wrote a blog post about attacking the chicken and egg problem: when users won't sign up because no one is there. Hopefully there will be some usable advice:

http://marketingstartups.com/2008/12/15/10-tips-on-attacking...

If you find it useful, pls let me know and I'll submit it to HN. I don't want to be the guy that submits everything he writes.

time. Resources. Lack of artistic/design skill

(actually, I'm selling about as fast as I can get servers up, so marketing is not high on the priority list right now)

check out http://prgmr.com/xen/

Horrible, no?

I'm moving to a design based on http://prgmr.com/~lsc/css/ - very minimalist (when I'm done, most words on that page will be links to more information)

The idea is that I have no taste. I can come up with something that conveys the idea, but I'm pretty much operating on blind trust when choosing a designer.

I can give you a long list of links to designs that I've got from people which were either clearly bad, or that other people told me were horrible.

In my business, credibility is very important. Well, that, and price, but I'm the cheapest of my competitors by quite a lot, so it's really only credibility I need to worry about. A web presence is part of that.

I was also approached about writing a book on the subject, so I imagine that will help: http://nostarch.com/xen.htm though I clearly have missed the hype sweet-spot.

I think that largely depends on what product is being sold and what market you're in.

Cloud9 sells software to tour operators and other travel suppliers and, unfortunately, our potential customers are not very internet savvy, making it rather difficult for us to reach potential customers.

I think Squeezed Books is a cool idea. I'm less certain that it will ever be a business that generates a lot of money, but I still put some effort into it, and would like to see it grow. Getting critical mass, though, is a bitch!

Figuring out a way to market an online product to a somewhat technophobic niche.

The chicken and the egg is probably the biggest problem. The new users don't want to join/buy because you lack content/users/reputation etc

Vaksel- Awesome point. You inspired me to write a post on exactly what you're talking about: http://marketingstartups.com/2008/12/15/10-tips-on-attacking...

Tell me about it, my social site relies on heavy user participation (in fact requires it) to be useful to other users. And unlike Digg, my content is worthless 24 hours later meaning I can't 'seed' the site with my own content effectively.

With my current project I've been having trouble being noticed. I've been featured on Mashable but that's about it.

Differentiation is pretty tough too (but integration has been easy!).

"... I've been having trouble being noticed ..."

Is the trouble getting users or just being picked up in the press? (both non-trivial problems)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com