Ask HN: How to Promote your startup on a $0 budget

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8787206

by kurt_bwc • 12 years ago

18 11 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

crjHome• 12 years ago

Twitter? Facebook? Other social media..

pstavro• 12 years ago

how about HN itself!?

NameNickHN• 12 years ago

Only if your business caters to developers and the like.

onion2k• 12 years ago

Talk to people. Go to meet-ups, networking events, cold call potential customers, get on social media, use free promotion services. Google 'growth hacking', which is pretty much the art of building traction at minimal cost. Find a cofounder who is well-connected and get them to advocate your product. Find evangelists who'll shout about your product simply because they love it. Hustle.

And remember that for most technical founders, the marketing side of startups is really damn hard compared to writing code, and is absolutely the main reason why most startups fail. You really should have this stuff figured out before you write a single line of code because without it you have no chance of succeeding. Products do not sell themselves.

haidrali• 12 years ago

Definitely social media also if you can take you story to front page of HN it will be great though it requires 100 karama

toumhi• 12 years ago

It depends on what you do. B2C? B2B? SaaS? Ecommerce?

At the beginning, the idea is to "do things that don't scale": do things manually, go get your users one by one.

At the same time experiment with traction channels: SEO, content marketing, social media, email, PR, email marketing, outbound sales. Do small experiments and do more of what works.

andrea_sdl• 12 years ago

since onion2k pretty much summarized everything, I'd like to share what I did for my side-project (a time tracker named Haptime) as "marketing".

First of all, I built the software only after I found 3 people in my circle of friends who were willing to pay it forward. This allowed me to understand if I was solving a real problem people would pay for or not (it was important to me, but this might not be of the same importance if you are on a freemium model, which might require a different take on this).

After that, I pretty much used:

1. Referral (for every client, try to make them super-happy every time and then ask for a referral of them)

2. Networking. Onion2k already told this, so, join and meet people who might help you or need you. In my case one breakthrough was to find out my product featured on product hunt (and near 100 upvotes) thanks to the relationships I built over time.

3. Reddit could be another place you find useful, although in my case I discovered that it's a community more geared towards free product (so if you have a trial, you must solve a really powerful problem to have them try it, or have a super-compelling homepage).

4. Quora is another place I gained a bit of traction thanks to some small, targeted questions I answered. Not much a big deal, but it's worth checking out.

Always remember, in everything you do, your goal must be to add value to the people or the conversation. I personally think that when you do only for marketing purpouse and not for the sake of adding more value to what you see, everything ends up being bad.

5. Giveaways are another great idea you can use, find a good blog/magazine in your niche and see if you get to place a giveaway over there.

6. If you are still struggling on how to build your network, the easiest way is to help people. Find people in your niche and help them in any possible and honest way. Don't think about marketing, think about just helping them without selling. Networking is made of friends (at least to me).

7. Timing is everything: If your website is featured in something like Product Hunt, JOIN the conversation and if you can, offer a greeting offer on your product page.

Also... time and effort is required. LOTS of it. For example Airbnb didn't grow up in a day, but grew up thanks to small, continuous ideas and efforts. As toumhi told you: do not automate until it's needed.

If you are an engineer you will want to automate. Resist that temptation, do it only when you can't do it yourself at all.

One nice read about gettin traction is tractionbook.com . I read it recently, and while some of the channels they describe for getting early users might have a price, others are really free, so it's a worth reading.

kurt_bwc2• 12 years ago

Thanks Andrea. This was very helpful.

jmnicolas• 12 years ago

Get hacked in a spectacular way (think Sony), everybody will know about you. Bad publicity is better than no publicity they say.

Of course it's tongue in cheek, good luck.

atmosx• 12 years ago

How are you going to be hacked in a spectacular if you are not already spectacular?!?!?!

kurt_bwc2• 12 years ago

Thanks guys, your comments make sense.

By the way my product does cater to the technical crowd - basically we give out 5 free components for websites every 7 days - http://buildwithcards.com/

Let's see how it goes!

Ask HN: How to Promote your startup on a $0 budget

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