Marketing Your Personal Projects [video]

discovermeteor.com

46 points·sgdesign··5 comments

Thanks Sacha. For idea validation, I'm always curious where people draw the line. You set up a sign-up form on an existing page, yes. But how many signups do you need before you consider it validated and worth pursuing? 10 signups? 100? 1000?

It depends on how many people land on that page. If you have 100 visitors a day and you have 10 sign-ups a day, that's an awesome conversion rate and probably a sign you can consider your idea validated.

Or you can approach it the other way around. If you have 1000 emails and you expect to convert 5% of them for a $20 product, you know you'll earn $1000 from your current audience, and can plan from there whether or not that's enough to justify working on a project.

Those are all random numbers obviously, but you get the idea.

This is great. How would you go about building an audience for a consumer product? For example, lets say I was building Tumblr today. How would you build an audience for it?

Even large apps like Snapchat or Instagram seem like they started out targeting a specific market first. Usually for tech startups that market is simply early adopters (or HN readers), but it could also be teenagers, photo enthusiasts, etc.

My point is that thinking of your audience as "everybody" isn't very helpful, so it can be a good idea to artificially restrict it to a particular segment even if (like Tumblr, Twitter, etc. did) you intend to eventually conquer the whole planet :)

So if I was building Tumblr today, I would first try building an audience in communities that I'm already familiar with, such as designers or the HN crowd.

Let me know if you have any questions/feedback/etc. :)

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