After my last post on getting a startup noticed, I started getting emails and comments that were all hinting at one question:
Sure, using these tools might get me some attention or a quick burst of traffic, but how do I make it sustainable?
Well, that’s a great question I pretended to just ask myself.
I think it’s important to take a few steps back from my previous post and look at promotion in context. I’ve always been repeating the same mantra since I started working with startups. I’ve said it so many times that people must be sick of me saying it, but I’ll do it one more time. You need to separate goals, strategies, tools and execution. It’s incredibly easy to jump right in and use every one of the 10 tips from the previous post, but if you haven’t done the groundwork, you won’t have steady, residual traffic.
So, let’s break the startup into phases and look at which promotional methods could work to get you going. These are completely arbitrary, off-the-top-of-my-head phases, so if I’m missing something, I apologize.
Phase One: The Idea
In this phase, you’re kicking around an idea that could materialize into a startup. You’re rightfully paranoid and don’t really want to give away your idea yet. Your goals:
- Test the viability of your idea
- Find out what others have done to get started
- Find out what competitors are out there and how you can stand out
In this phase, your main strategy is to get out there and do as much research as possible. Google is your friend, but there are plenty of other resources that can help you.
Tools:
1. HackerNews- This is very quickly becoming my favorite site. It’s a social news site focused primarily on tech startups and entrepreneurs. It’s very tech-heavy and most of the contributors are entrepreneurial people with extreme tech saavy. You’ll find many Ask HN posts where would be entrepreneurs ask the community questions about their startups. It’s an indispensable resource for any tech entrepreneur, but DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT abuse it. If you try to use HackerNews to promote something irrelevant, it WILL backfire.
2. SitePoint Forums- Back when I was writing code, I basically learned everything I know about PHP/MySQL from the experts at Sitepoint. Sitepoint has a community of developers, entrepreneurs, etc. and a very active forum with experts willing to assist annoying newbies like I was. Additionally, sitepoint has forums for blogging, content, planning your site, promotion, etc. If you’re looking for advice or feedback, this is a great resource.
3. Mashable, Centernetworks, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, etc.- Go to these sites and search around to see what other startups have launched that are similar to what you want to offer. Keep a list of competitors and search them to find out what they’re up to. This will give you a good starting point to find out who you’ll be competing with.
Phase Two: The Super-Secret Alpha Product
Yep, I’ve skipped quite a bit of time, but let’s now pretend we’ve got something. Code has been written, and the product actually does something. Maybe we’re calling at a POC, maybe an alpha. Either way, something’s working, but it’s not ready for the masses. At this point, your goals are:
- Get people to try it out
- Solicit feedback to find out what works, what doesn’t, and what else is needed
- Start growing an exclusive community of users that care
Right now you want people to use your stuff and let you know what they think about it. You’ve tested it yourself many times, but you’re just too close to the code to be objective. Since you eventually want many people to be your users, you need to let people hammer away at what you have and give you feedback from someone that is new.
Tools:
1. Friends and family- It’s a hell of a lot easier to apologize to your uncle Frank when a feature fails than a complete stranger that feels like they’re wasting their time when there’s a hiccup. I always like to email all of my friends and family and set their expectations, letting them know this is a project I’m working on that isn’t quite ready for the world yet. I tell them there are going to be problems, so please let me know when something isn’t quite right. Your friends and family are much more apt to take the time to beta test what you’re working on, and they’ll tell you when something is busted.
2. Evangelists- It’s not hard to see that I’m a beta addict and that I’ll test out just about anything that is new. I’m a perfect person for this. Look around online and find the people that are blogging about the topic your service/product targets, and ask them if they’d like to try it out. Let them know that it’s in an early stage and that you’re opening up to an exclusive group of alpha testers. It’s a great way to build a small, vocal community of users that feel ownership in what you’re doing. You can’t beat that.
Phase Three: Invite-Only Beta
You’re ready for people to sign up. Congratulations. Nice job. (Again, I’m skipping WAAAAY ahead) You’re not quite ready for the entire world to join, but you’re open for new users. A couple of strategies:
- Offer invites to bloggers- I’m a huge sucker for this over at blogstring. Whenever someone says “I have 50 invites for your readers if you want to post about us”, I almost always jump at the offer.
- Offer exclusives to bloggers- I’m not big on this one, but I see a lot of people doing this. Offering a coverage exclusive to one blogger may be incentive enough to get coverage you might not normally get.
- Offer invites to your alpha users- They’ve brought you this far. Give them invites in case they want their friends to join the fun, and do it in conjunction with an email message thanking them for getting you to this point.
In this phase, your tools are your email list and database of users. This stage is really all about extending the personal relationships you’ve already formed in the prior phases.
Phase Four: Public Beta
Now you’re ready for the big time. But simply adding a join button on your home page isn’t going to bring excited crowds to your door. Now it’s time to go into promo mode. Some strategies:
- Reach out to bloggers- If someone has covered you before, regardless of how big they are, let them know that you’re entering public beta. thank them for what they’ve done for you so far, and let them know any new features you’ve added since the private beta.
- Talk about it- Talk about your service on your blog, on your employees blogs, twitter, etc. Let people know you’re open for business and that you have feedback mechanisms in place to handle what users are saying.
- Let your users know- Let your users know that the service is now open to the world and let them know how much you appreciate what they’ve done for you.
Tools:
1. Your blog- You’ve already been blogging about what you’re doing. Post there about the public beta.
2. Twitter- Let everyone on twitter know that you’ve opened your doors
3. Other bloggers- Reach out to everyone that covers what you do, and let them know about your public launch. Search google blog search and find everyone that has covered you and let them know that you’re about to launch publicly.
4. Analysts- You’ve done research on analysts that cover your industry. Now let them know you’re open for business
5. Events- Go to events like the Web Innovators Group and present your company there. Find events that cater to your crowd and either sponsor or present what you have.
It’s at this phase (and not earlier) that you really want the world to know about you. You’ve ironed out all the kinks (within reason) and you already have a respectable userbase. That part is huge. One of the biggest problems in having any “social” online service is the classic: “I don’t want to join. No one is there.”
Think of any forum you’ve ever visited. Even if the content is good, if there’s a very small user base, odds are you won’t join. It’s the biggest problem in having a community site: You can’t get new users because you don’t have any current users. No one wants to go to an empty restaurant.
It’s because of this that you really want to nurture your early adopters. The activity and content they produce will help you immensely when you’re ready for public beta.
Summary
This article is so basic and overly simplistic that it’s almost embarassing. But hey, it’s a start. There’s no real way to fully cover the entire life cycle of a startup and the associated promotional methods in one blog post. If it were that easy, everyone would have a startup and I’d be out of a job.
But I think it’s important to segment your promotional phases based on where you are right now. Jumping ahead will make people think you’re an amateur. Lagging behind will leave you ready to launch with no users.
I’d love to hear what you think.
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