Ask HN: What is the best way to introduce your startup to the world? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the best way to introduce your startup to the world?

17 pointskdforf7 comments

I'm about to launch my new startup but I'm not sure how to promote it. I know that HackerNews is a great community to introduce it but regularly no one pays attention to a new user posts. Social media is good too but not for those who don't have enough friends on the web or their friends are not their audience. For example I'm launching an English startup but mostly my friends do not understand English.

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One lesson I've learned over the years: You can keep launching until someone notices, but if you have to "launch" in the first place, that's the business equivalent of a code smell.

Once you accept that you will not get coverage on any of the major sites, you can think about how to promote your product. You should have already started before you built anything, to make sure your product solves someone's problem. If it solves even one person's problem well, chances are they will know other people who have the same problem and will be your biggest advocate / promotion avenue.

For promotion, sometimes the old tricks are the best tricks. Yes, ads cost money, but $100 spent on AdSense can still send a lot of people to your site if you spend it wisely.

So don't worry about launching, worry about minimizing your customer acquisition cost. And start by simply advertising so you have an initial cost of acquisition for your estimates.

This.

Our startup is an automatic summarization API (http://www.textteaser.com/). I once wrote an article in Medium (https://medium.com/medium-ideas/59b1747c1d36) to showcase how our technology will perform with Medium articles. It received good feedback. Frontpage in Hacker News plus top post in Medium for last month. We then create a bot in Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/user/tldrrr?sort=top) to summarize submitted articles. Mostly good feedback but some subreddits banned the bot eventually.

So my tip is, don't just show the world your product. Show the world what your product can do.

It is best if you can show your product to where people are familiar with. In my case I used Medium, and Reddit. I'm planning to do it to some popular web applications next time.

Unfortunately we are still in beta, but this is exactly the problem we are tackling. Hopefully within a couple of months we will be helping you or similar people. In the meantime, I agree about the good comment below about advertising. And also you should be pushing it to friends and family first. Although a language barrier seems to be an obstacle, I am sure you can find at least a couple of friends to use/recommend your app. We think of it as a tree, first branching is hard but possible, the rest is just growing the tree. Advertising as well as active participation is key here. Needless to say, good quality product/service is essential too. All the best with your endeavour

It depends entirely on the type of business you are building. There is no one fits all answer. Give us more background, otherwise you should read PG's memos or answers on Quora.

I'm working on a Google Reader alternative which in my opinion is a lot more useful! It gathers the news from across the web based on the user's interests and summarizes them like summly. Also it comes with a system to save the posts to read them later and let's users to add their own feeds and lets the users to turn the posts summarizing on or off for specific feeds.

This looks really cool and I actually need something like this. I would target busy people who don't have time to read full articles, and I would use a mobile platform to distribute this (iPhone/Android apps). Try also students that needs to summarise long text for school, this should help them. And blog writters should put a preview/summary of the article on top of it so send it to them as well, with an example of their article summarised in your emails.

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