Ask HN: Ok, so i have an awesome app, and 10K in budget, now what?

It may take some time, but start a blog about something related to the app and push your articles to as many places as possible (stumbleupon, twitter, etc).

When you pay for marketing, you will make mistakes that cost you money during the learning process. You should only do this when you can afford to do so.

You might start with putting a link here.

The advice will proably be a combination of online marketing strategies out there. CPC, SEO, viral loops, what not...Some will work better than others, some will work quicker, some slower.

It's relly hard to give further advice without knowing details.

Create something that makes people so happy they will tell their friends about it.

If its so awesome why didn't you mention it? You have to promote it, and you don't always need money.

The eat your own dogfood axiom is a good method for starting out. Post about your app on places where it is relevant, how it has helped bring about alignment of the planets and increased your bowling scores, etc. If it is highly interactive and fun to use or watch it being used, make a youtube video on "Get Ninja (insert category of app) Skillz With Easy App X"

If it is crowd sourced thing maybe run a contest to gather content/interest, don't have to blow ten grand on it, only a few hundred and some well placed shout-outs about the contest.

I myself like to look at videos and screenshots of apps (ohhh... shiny stuff!) You have a site with screenshots??

Talk with people about it.

Finding a (legitimate) excuse to post on reddit (or similar) gets a surprising number of hits. I can't tell you anything about conversion rates of those visitors, but just the other day I broke down and submitted a company blog post to the relevant category on reddit and got a few hundred hits in a few hours even though it didn't get many upvotes and zero comments. It was an actual essay, not a sales pitch, but at least they ended up on my company's site.

As far as I can tell, it seems that lots of people are interested in "this is where I see my niche going" posts for any industry or technology. The people who will end up at your site probably are already thinking about that niche, but they are probably your best bet for early adopters, anyway.

Maybe all that is obvious and old news. Like you, I find it hard to get excited about social media marketing so I'm just now begrudgingly experimenting with it. It's not a long term strategy, but it should be enough to build some traction.

And if you really want to spend money, a good copy editor for every word that ends up representing your product definitely gets you better copy much faster.

Depending on where you live, there are many meetup groups (or similar groups) that meet monthly to demo new products, discuss new technologies, etc. Find a few of those groups, make presentations, receive feedback. If you live in an area without these groups, look up a few in a specific geographic area (ex: SF Bay Area), contact the organizers, arrange to present at a few of them over a week long period and take a working vacation.

join and participate in some forums that are niche related and have users interested in what you built. You can easily bootstrap a SaaS if you have a presence and some authority on a few forums.

Do you actually have an app? If so, can you talk about it at all or send demos? I, and I imagine many others on HN, could directly fund the project directly if the idea and execution are good.

If you are just asking the rhetorical question, it depends on whether or not the app requires a critical mass of users (ie social networking) In either case, your best bet is to publish and start discussing on a forum (HN is a great start).

Realise that massive success is not going to happen overnight.

Don't dismiss SEO because it will "take months to get ranked" - start pursuing SEO now and in a couple of months you can rank. If your idea is unique, that's great! Try to rank for the problems that people have, not how your app solves them.

While you're waiting for your SEO efforts to pay off, use PPC to refine your marketing message. Test, analyse, refine, repeat. PPC is an expensive way of getting users at first, but it's a cheap way of refining your marketing.

Finally, find people that are experiencing the problem that your app solves. Join and contribute to communities, sponsor competitions, write guest blog posts. Establish yourself before using the back-channels to Mashable/Techcrunch.

Do all this stuff for a couple of months and don't get downhearted if nothing pays off immediately. It's investment.

Have you considered finding customers that are actually going to pay you a decent amount of money? E.g. business-to-business may turn out to be slow going, unsexy and very profitable.

Solution three: make the app so good that people love it and spread the word.

I would say solution one should be "be more positive and don't write off options as retarded unnecessarily". Your answer is probably a well thought out combination of all of the above and lots and lots of hard work and effort.

I have a different take. Get professional marketing help.

This is not impossible. I - a professional marketing person - am your mirror. I have ideas, skills and the ability to get noticed but lack the ability to code. There are many like me and our talents and abilities are both real and valuable.

Find someone like me and partner with them. They can then do what you can't which is build an audience with very little budget.

In case you're wondering how, a lot of it is contacts. just like it is with code. For instance, I can get ads on networks at cost thanks to having friends that run them and owe me favors. I can also contact journalists who are friends directly. Finally, I already have the network and reach you don't.

Good luck. I think there's a huge gap for recognizing the value of non-tech skills in startups.

There us no one size fits all solution to marketing a startup / website. Usually, it is a combination of PR, SEO, CPC, Display advertising, Social, Viral techniques etc. Post the URL of your website, or answer the following questions:

- What problem does it solve?

- Who are your customers / users?

- Where do they frequent?

Then we figure out a strategy to reach them.