Ask HN: Advice for my startup - Best use of 14,000 email addresses?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1556669

by metachris • 16 years ago

7 5 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I've built a few simple multiplayer games for Android and about 14,000 players have (optionally) submitted their email with an expressed interest in hearing about new related projects. Don't know if that's a lot but I guess they might be of some value if I can put them to use. My startup now became a multiplayer engine and hosted gameserver infrastructure, with a beta version currently released for Android developers (http://www.flockengine.com).

How do you think I could best use those email addresses?

They are all from people enjoying multiplayer games on Android, therefore it could be an interesting promotion channel for Android developers using my framework. Another idea could be simply to start building an email newsletter. I would really appreciate your feedback / advice!

hajrice• 16 years ago

In my opinion, an email newsletter would be fantastic. Jason L Baptiste recently wrote a great article on that(link: http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/email-newsletters-are-sti...).

You could target the gamers(focusing on the gamers that play multiplayer games) audience and have website whose target audience you're serving pay you for ads.

I remember there was a discussion on HN mentioning this topic, someone said that you could easily take 300 for a CPM for email newsletters.

Thus, if you do the math you have near 6k from newsletters.

Good luck! :)

mschaecher• 16 years ago

Agreed. There have been some good articles here lately about email newsletters. Try searchyc.com to find them. Mixergy also has some good interviews with people running successful newsletter startups.

Could also use it as an upsell product or free value add-on for people/companies using your game platform.

metachris2• 16 years ago

Thanks for the tips! I did find a couple of interesting submissions through searchyc, in particular via http://searchyc.com/submissions/newsletter and http://searchyc.com/submissions/email+newsletter

These are the mixergy interviews I've been able to find:

* How Ideal Bite (a email newsletter company) sold for $20 Mil (http://mixergy.com/jen-boulden-ideal-bite-interview/)

* Peter Shankman HARO: The Email Newsletter That Grosses $1+ Mil A Year (http://mixergy.com/haro-peter-shankman/)

metachris2• 16 years ago

After more thoughts it seems that building an email newsletter about Android games might be the way to go. >10k is a good initial userbase. The newsletter could later become a promotion channel for developers and I can include that into the multiplayer framework package too.

Two main questions for me right now are the frequency (weekly or biweekly maybe(?)) and the content of the newsletter. Android games related topics is an interesting niche - and a heavily expanding one if the current growth of Android continues. Any suggestions what I could write about? Perhaps game reviews and what's going on in the Android game scene in general? I think there will be a couple of interesting things coming up with C2DM [1], where the private beta is currently starting (got an invite today - for the multiplayer engine! :).

Maybe I could also partner with existing Android app / game / review websites.

Ideas and advices are greatly appreciated!

[1] http://code.google.com/android/c2dm/index.html (Google's cloud-to-device messaging, introduced in Android 2.2)

Ask HN: Advice for my startup - Best use of 14,000 email addresses?

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