CGherb858

PR is your best bet and it's pretty easy. I suggest baby steps.

1) Who are your early adopters? Age, sex, location, profession, hobbies, what do they read. Survey monkey and offer a free month or something

2) Choose a segment of your 50.

3) Create a list of blogs, newspapers, magazines to pitch that the segment reads

4) Begin pitching the outlets.

5) Measure the new sign ups per article using google analytics

There's alot of small details in each step but this is the big picture

Shore answer, yes.

Are you a co-founder or an employee? Everyone's first job is to sell. So yes to recruiting, yes to pitching, yes to recruiting, yes to researching the market, yes to roadmaps. And in reverse, your biz co-founder should be helping you get the correct development tool licenses, supply you with photoshop designs, get hosting deals, etc. Think about deciding what cloud hosting you're going to use? This isn't about just technology because this decision shapes your COGS.

Quick Anecdote: When Google was hiring their first vp of marketing, the interviews were attended by their original vp of engineering. When the vp of marketing was hired the vp of engineering insisted that he split an office with marketing. This allowed for frequent communications between the two and gave them an advantage when creating products. Google's products were always a combo of engineering and marketing.