Ask HN: Fellow bootstrapped start-ups - How did you market to the masses?
I launched my start-up about a month ago and have been fortunate to have some great tech press but am not sure how to break out into the masses. How do you get your app/product/service in front of joe and jane public when your marketing budget is next to nill?
Thanks in advance for your help.
For reference, here is a little blurb about what we do:
The Wisdom of Others - An app for making personalized quote books filled with the practical advice, useful wisdom and favorite quotes of family and friends.
Link: www.TheWisdomofOthers.com
Published in 2011, this chronicle by @TWOO details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
A few (rather obvious) tips.
- SEO - make sure your site can be found by certain keywords. A lot of traffic can be driven from Google. Maybe focus on "quotes of wisdom" or something. Recently there was a website on HN discussing how to monetize his site - 80% of his traffic came from Google. You need SEO. There is a great guide on the SEOmoz website.
- Blog content - write some really good content that is useful for people who don't use your product. First of all, it helps with overall SEO, second of all it will help with referrals that bring customers that actually do want to use it. This shouldn't be hard given you are a winsdom-sharing based site. Find some inspirational stories etc. etc.
- Partnerships - try to get some partnerships with similar companies or companies where you can help one another. Ex: look for a partnerships with a virtual book design site or something.
These are just a few off the top of my head. Best of luck
This is the perfect kind of product, which can benefit from a meme app like threewords.me or thathigh.com. Make an app through which people can share some quotes (funny, inspirational, etc) which has a viral loop built-in. Get some buzz going and instead of showing someone else's ads, sell your own product.
You need to jazz up your homepage a bit more. Show an example book. This should be on your homepage, not hidden behind 5 clicks - https://www.thewisdomofothers.com/book-examples#/page/1.
Mine twitter for quotes and have a live feed running on your homepage.
This is a user generated content product. You need to leverage that. Make all content free and public and just sell the hardcover book.
Your pricing looks way too complicated. I'd say, have one single price so that it's an easy impulse purchase.
What really helped us:
1) Content marketing. Write blog articles consistently and promote them to a relevant audience. Forums are usually the best place to share your articles.
2) SEO. Get the basics down (friendly URLs, titles and descriptions, h1/h2/h3 tags, etc.), and try to get quality backlinks. Work on long-tail keywords. Blogging consistently also helps with SEO.
3) PR. Keep working on PR; get stories from small to big blogs and news websites. It's a neat way of getting backlinks too.
4) Hanging out on forums where your customers hang out and display your expertise. Don't spam; contribute genuinely. Hopefully people will be intrigued enough that they check your company out.
I went to your site and my toolbar has a gizmo that tells me things like PR (google's page rank) & Alexa ranking - the 'ranking' on your page indicates "Private" which tells me that you may be blocking your site from the search engines. You might want to take a look at that!
in the same boat my start up is boodhii.org