I've never done any kind of user acquisition besides posting to Reddit and HN. I realize that this is, needless to say, not a working strategy. What do you people do?
Advertising. AdWords PPC and banners on relevant sites. You can use tools like http://mixrank.com/ (YC S11) to see where your competitors advertise and what ads they use.
Adwords, Forums, facebook groups, blog audiences, commenting, twitter, pinterest.
Go and find out where you customer hangs out online. Who already has your perfect audience on their mailing list? See if you can write something of value for their audience and tap into existing groups.
When you do get users, ask how they found you then double down on promoting in that channel.
Some of those suggestions (eg. comments) may represent a risk to search ranking. From what I understand, Google considers comments a negative signal. Perhaps it's only duplicate comments, though. Can someone more experienced than I am please provide their perspective here?
I've got 3 people cold-calling and driving around the country showcasing our product. They started last week. This is the first time I'm trying selling an online service this way, I must say that I am pleasantly surprised by the feedback and the signups.
It can be a working strategy if you're building a lifestyle business and don't care about hockey-stick growth or making millions.
I'm an armchair entrepreneur for now (just getting that out of the way), but the advice I've seen over and over again can be generalized as: "Go out and talk to peope". You'll want to avoid starting with a sales pitch. Instead, talk to them about their business (or life) and see if your product is a fit (ie: don't try to sell a social network for cats to a dog owner). If it seems like there's some product fit, ask how they are filling the need now. If appropriate, give the the elevator pitch and a 1min demo on your live product. Ideally, convert them by having them sign up for a trial right then and there on your computer, followed by walking them through the COOLEST thing they can do on your product.
Rinse, repeat.
That's my 2 cents. Also interested what others think.
If appropriate, give the the elevator pitch and a 1min demo on your live product.
I want to point out the the above snippet assumes/implies a fairly deep knowledge of your intended audience, the problem space you are working in and several other things, any one of which might be the real problem as to why the OP is not getting traction.
I think if you want to be successful you need to have good knowledge about your audience. Maybe not when you are first starting out, but you should when you have a product to sell.
You won't be a good golf club salesman if you know absolutely nothing about golf.
That's part of my point. We don't know where the OP is coming from though in terms of how well he/she knows the problem space, etc. If they don't know it well enough, perhaps pointing this out will help them.
I don't think it is a working strategy ever, to be honest. What you usually want to get decent returns is not necessarily hockey-stick growth (unless the game is to impress investors but this usually leads to questions of gaming the system). What you want is decent, modest, exponential growth (when you are small your growth can approach exponential levels, but when you are big you have problems keeping it up, due to the fact that most growth in a finite market will resemble a sigmoid in shape -- this is also why big companies can't successfully innovate).
Getting out and taking to people, as you say, is where it is at, regardless of your business goals. Start with the three F's of fundraising (friends, family, fools) and go from there. Posting on Reddit and HN is good to create discussion or buzz, but it won't by itself get you sales.
Another thing I would recommend is that you do two things:
1. Write a marketing plan. Talk about the market, who you are going for, and how you will reach them. Discuss both PR and advertising, as well as other forms of outreach. Review it, write it as a team. Get everyone on the same page.
2. Then once that is done, put it on the shelf and don't look at it for a year. Act as if the plan doesn't exist. Go out and promote your product. Come back in a year and compare what you did and what you accomplished to what you set out in the plan.
How long was the turnaround between submitting to betali.st and getting featured? I've heard some people submit just a few days before going live, so by the time users get invites it's still fresh in their minds.
Actually for us it was pretty long (which I don't recommend). I think what you suggested is a much better strategy.
I think it was around 3 months so it wasn't as fresh but what I did was go through email addresses one by one, picked out the companies that sounded the most promising and opened up a dialogue to get those guys in early.
Then kept the other guys informed to try and keep them excited. Although if I would have done it just before launching I would have saved a lot of effort.
Yea that's what I'd be afraid of. It sounds like you handled it well. Since betali.st only features products that haven't fully launched yet, I just don't want to submit, and then by the time they see my submission we're live and they won't accept it. How long did it take between when you submitted to them and when you were actually featured?
What's your general field? B2B, especially for big industries, tends to call for networking and possibly cold calls. Individual sales tends to call for advertising with a focus on high relevance sites. Social or two-sided markets (think credit card companies and users) tend to call for narrow early focus via outreach to online or physical communities. This simulates widespread use by creating a regionally high use space.
If you're in a specific field (e.g. online cello sales), do outreach to things like relevant forums and subreddits. You'll get targeted use which will provide quality feedback, hopefully. If it's a broad spectrum project, buy up relevant and cheap(ish) ads in several venues. Push use with some definable group that you can interact with directly, get emails via a newsletter, etc.
In my opinion reddit is very underrated in terms of customer acquisition. It's a target community of early adopters who are willing to start a conversation with you. For my start-up, 900dpi, I got our first 400 users from reddit after failing miserably through other channels. We found our best success in /r/web_design but have also looked at /r/frontend and /r/webdev. Sometimes your best traffic comes from comments in other peoples posts (where redditors are asking for a product like yours or discussing a problem that you solve). Our product has been picked up on a couple blogs too after being discovered by the bloggers via a reddit post.
I've also had luck with some other niche community sites such as Designer News. The important piece here is to try and integrate yourself into the community instead of just spamming them with links to your website. Get involved in conversations about things other than your start-up (people notice this and appreciate it). Make friends with the moderators. When Designer News was still private with no search capabilities I wrote a quick search engine built on sphinx to index all of the posts and make them searchable. Not only did this get me an invite to the community but also sent some nice traffic to my start-ups site via a small link on the search page.
I've had little to no success with twitter and facebook, although I might be doing it wrong. Some of the targeted communities that you can find through google plus look somewhat promising, but I've yet to fully explore these.
Our most vocal power users are people we know personally, or met at local events (our local co-working space).
If you have a product that may generate profit, e.g. a SaaS application targeting businesses, not a money burning consumer-app train (see: twitter or another photo album app) one of the strategies that work is cold emailing:
0. Identify and name your target group, e.g. commercial real estate agents in CA.
1. Find these people on Linkedin using advanced search option and invite them to connect.
2. Once connected you have their e-mail address, so send them a short e-mail (better response rate than InMails) describing the business problem and your solution. Short means 3-5 sentences, no attachments, just try to attract their attention.
3. Don't forget about follow-ups.
4. They will reply if interested and bam, you have a lead! Now it's time to set up a call and go into details.
5. Rinse and repeat. Stay persistent, you should send at least 20+ every day. Track response rates and adjust, you should achieve at least 5-10% easily.
This is borderline to SPAM, so I think the e-mails should be very personal.
If you have many competitors I am probably getting lot's of these e-mails which means you would have much harder time to get my attention.
Let's say you are a hosting provider, I probably would not like to get an e-mail from you offering me some good price or hard to understand feature of yours, because there are probably lot's of cheap hosting providers out there and every other provider is trying to differentiate themselves somehow. Other than "identifying my problem" you really shouldn't sound like giving me a sales pitch.
But if you noticed that, let's say I have 350ms response time in Asia when it's only 50 in USA and you have some solution for it, I probably will reply you even if I am not going to buy your service right away.
Very good point on "identifying my problem", maybe it's better to be "identifying my specific problem" that nobody else can resolve for me. Thank you.
I'm sort of learning this point from others and trying to apply it to draw people's attention. I showed people that you need to build a private version of the web that stores the only information you are interested in or related to you. And we have a tool to help you create your Private
Web with a few clicks. But I failed. Can you please pinpoint out why? The Kickstarter project is here: http://kck.st/JNqv8z
But if you noticed that, let's say I have 350ms response time in Asia when it's only 50 in USA and you have some solution for it, I probably will reply you even if I am not going to buy your service right away.
That reminds me of a technique I used when doing freelance Web design. I focused on restaurants with bad websites. I wrote a crawler that searched for restaurants with email addresses on the site, but bad html like font or center tags or flash. I would then email them a sample site with their name and logo inserted programmatically. It got pretty good response.
This is Cool! Actually it was my plan to find local businesses with bad/outdated websites and offer them a "renovation" but I didn't think to do this pragmatically. Thanks for the cool idea :) If I am going to look for some freelance work, I may actually try to imitate your approach.
Yeah, to me some evidence that the person has attempted to understand what I do and why this product would actually help me (considered honestly) is what distinguishes interesting contacts from spam. I'm in academia rather than industry, but I think some at least vaguely similar principles apply.
I get some cold emails that, while slightly disguised, boil down to: "a paper you wrote came up in a Google scholar search for 'Prolog', and we also have a logic and/or rule system that's great, pls see this website and let me know if you want any details on licensing". Those are not usually that interesting, since of course I know there are such systems out there, and can Google for them myself...
On the other hand, if you read in the Future Work section of a paper I wrote something along the lines of, "it'd be great if X existed, but it doesn't seem to", and you think you really have built something meeting the description of X, then emailing me saying so is usually quite interesting and non-generic.
Exactly! This is how I differentiate SPAM from legit e-mails too. I don't mind if somebody is offering me some service or something, why should I? If I have a problem to be solved, I would be happy to get the offer.
One cool technique I saw recently (which isn't always applicable) is from a talk by Jason Cohen: http://vimeo.com/74338272 (around minute 7)
In a nutshell when he was building WPEngine he went to LinkedIn and found folks who were Wordpress consultants. He then sent them a follow email and said he's building a product for "folks like you and would love to talk to you about your pains, needs, etc" (customer development stuff) and offered to pay for their time. It worked well - he sent 40, 100% agreed to talk, actually talked to 38, and 0 asked for money. He suggests this worked so well because the offer to pay showed he was respectful of their time so they were happy to help. YMMV.
You have a very good example for shooting against the target niche where you have your best audience to listen to you. But the question is: "when he was building WPEngine", there are already 40 folks "who were Wordpress consultants"? Then the result is not unexpected, and can not be consider a good example. Sorry if I misunderstood you. What we want know is how he got that 40 consultants to working on WPEngine in the first place.
WordPress was around for years before WPEngine started. There were thousands of WordPress consultants at that time, and he was building a WordPress hosting platform.
There were numerous WP consultants when he did this. They were his target customers.
He interviewed them about their pain points and found that their pain was in line with what he had in mind for WPEngine (easy, fast, secure, no-friction hosting for WP)
He asked them to write him a check at the end of the interview. BAM, customers. (I make this sound easier than it is..)
Oh, thank you both for your quick responses. So he really did a good job to solve the pains of his potential customers. Now the question becomes: how WP got so many consultants in the first place? But that's out of the scope of the parent posting, it still within the scope of the OP though, :)
Based on my experience, it's very hard for people to accept something new in the first place, for example, when WP was introduced. And this is still happening now. Once a group of people accept a new concept, building on top of it to improve the system is a little easier.
Well, arguably there was no established customer base for WPEngine before the launch. You either were a hobbyist and hosted for free on wordpress.com. Or you were a multi-billion dollar enterprise and used Automattic's premium hosting service (serious $$$).
OK. Thinking about it, there might have been a market there all along, but how come no one served it before?
I mean Jason is crazy brilliant (talk to him, it's an experience!), but surely others could have come up with the same idea - right? I guess we'll never know, but my guess is that not too many people went out and searched for a thing like WPEngine before WPEngine
> how WP got so many consultants in the first place?
There are 75 million (!) WordPress sites in the world. It would be amazing if any software platform with 75 million users didn't have a large number of consultants available to help people with it.
How should I acquire users for classified ads website?
I've done this site recently, it's my first personal project:
http://oglos.info/
I managed got some ads etc. I will appreciate feedback :) and suggestions related with the site (it's not in english but it's extremely easy so it should be understandable).
What's your product and who is your target user? Where do they spend their time? LinkedIn, Reddit, and HN won't help if you're trying to reach, for example, teenage girls.
TL:DR;
- get a splash page up and start collecting emails
- guest blog - particularly in places you know your would-be-users will read
- organize an event
- play around with paid marketing
2. write 20+ articles on industry-related topics (this alone will bring in some traffic)
3. get a number of emails from prospective customers
4. write a PERSONALIZED email to everyone on the list and ask if they are interested in an interview to be published on your blog. Offer a link from your blog as additional incentive
When you write the articles, do you SEO on questions that people may ask in their searches or just write general articles not necessarily pushing your product?
I do both.
Sometimes I look for long tail keywords (< 200 local exact match searches in Google's Keyword Planner tool). I then write mildly optimized posts for that.
On other days I am like "that should be an interesting topic and I want to write about it". When I do this I don't even think about SEO.
Good for you to have such high response rate. I learned the first two tactics from other people and applied it to my project. My blog posts usually have some hits everyday without prospects. I think my blogs did help some people and brings interesting topics. Unfortunately no luck. I'd appreciate if you can give me any input. Here is the blog: http://bingobo.info/blog/.
Typically, you swap them their email address for something they'd presumably want. Instant download of a white paper, one-month free course delivered over email about $FOO, etc.
Patrick already mentioned the best way to get email addresses.
However, for my use case (i.e. emailing cold contacts) you usually don't get their address handed to you. I just looked them up with a combination of Yellow Pages and Google-Fu.
Now that I think of it, I could probably ask the people on my list for interviews. Thanks for the idea, Patrick :-)
I've grown https://www.uncover.com (a simple tool to give employees perks and rewards) in various different ways. A lot of it began with telling my network of friends who run startups. Getting them signed up. Then getting them to tell their friends how much they liked it. Once that source was depleted, I began to do a lot of content marketing. I started writing for a lot of different blogs, websites, etc. That helped get out name out there and brought in about a third of our current customers. I'm now beginning to experiment with buying ads. It's still too early to tell how well that will work out, though.
I'm not in your target audience, but I found your site originally on a Show HN and have seen it be recommended to others on various places ever since so you seem to be doing something right! :)
With LiberWriter, I targeted forums where our users actually hang out, and gave useful answers to questions, with the URL at the end of the message as a sort of '.signature'.
HN is far, far away from our target audience, so posts here - even on the top of the front page - have gotten me pretty much 0 conversions. That's fine, though.
Me too. I tried hard here, but I dare not to attaché the URL with every post. I got 0 conversations too, even though part of my target users/customers are here.
I know. That's why I only embed URLs when it's relevant to the topic and provide my input to the topic first. I usually got negative points up to -4 which made me so frustrated.
It's super early, but we've already gotten 500 users who are looking to beta test software and we've already started sending out codes.
Our goal is to make it the best platform for developers to get their first 100 users and the best place for users to get early & free access to awesome apps.
If you're interested please sign up either as a user or a developer—we're sending out stuff weekly!
In essence: Go where your users hang out. With few exceptions, this is probably NOT the same place as where startup geeks hang out.
One example: my startup has a website for the Energy & Utilities industry. We got a bunch of early users by forming a partnership with a trade organization for energy providers.
I'm very lucky to have two co-founders who are both much better at sales and business development than I, so one of them handled the details... But my recollection is that they approached us with a very vague idea that we were doing good stuff and maybe we can work together somehow? First instinct might have been to try to sell them ads (we're fully ad-supported), but after talking to them what they really wanted was 1) ways to provide more value to their members, 2) ways to do internal promotions to existing members and 3) things that are really easy for them to execute. So we racked our brains and came up with a deal where we write, manage, and send a weekly email newsletter with content tailored for their audience. The newsletter has both our logos in it and we promote it to our larger audience. They have a section they can use to promote their own events and content, and we promote the newsletter to our larger audience. We also provide discounts on ads to their members.
It's not the sort of deal that "easy" in that it took real work to put together. But I think it's worked out great for everyone.
I haven't done any promotion for http://asoftmurmur.com besides posting to reddit and HN, and it now has 400-500 regular daily users. It depends entirely on what type of product or service you're offering.
Another key thing is to understand the community. There is radical cultural diversity between subreddits which manifests in very different reactions to self-promotion. It's essential to engage appropriately and respectfully.
Something I've used for other projects is searching for coverage of competitors in the same space, then pitching to people who have already featured them. Again, very important to hand-tailor each pitch and offer value to the person you're contacting.
I have to say, that's probably partly because you actually have a good product. Added to my bookmarks. I've been looking for something like this for years. Thanks for making it!
Thanks very much for using it! I built it because I wanted it to exist. I got tired of jury rigging three instances of VLC together on my laptop every time I wanted some background noise.
Oh man, I love this. I've been using it since you've posted to HN.
For the life of me, though, I haven't been able to remember the name the last couple time's I've wanted it (and my bookmarks are horrendously disorganized at the moment), and googling different iterations of "white noise generator sliders people birds rain" didn't yield success. I need to stash this away somewhere I won't lose it...
I have actually wondered about the name thing. It is a little whimsical, and I guess it would be easy to mix up with lots of similar descriptions like "a quiet buzz" or "a gentle burble". From that perspective, it might have been better to choose something more memorable.
The site won't rank well in google for descriptive terms because it doesn't contain a lot of text. Even for terms it does contain, it doesn't do very well (e.g. it ranks at ~20 for "ambient noise" in google US). I haven't worried about that so far because the large majority of the traffic is direct, social or for the exact term "a soft murmur".
Perhaps the reason a large portion of the traffic is direct, social etc. is you're far better optimized in these areas.
Based on your other comments it seems like you really know what you're doing in these spaces. I'm no expert, but based on all the positive feedback, capturing organic search traffic could help you kill it. Show them and they'll stick.
I've come across this site several times and promptly forgot where to find it.. perhaps a browser extension will make your user base more sticky instead of transient (I have no idea what i just said but it works).
>>> It depends entirely on what type of product or service you're offering.
And the luck/chance involved :) basically, the votes a new link gets in first 30mins largely decides whether it will make to front page or not. More specifically, the first upvote because then social proof kicks in (hey it must be good if someone liked it).
So while posting to HN/Reddit might help to kick in, I would take it more as 'good if it hits, fine if it doesn't'.
Sure. I didn't mean to suggest that if your product is a good fit it will definitely get a lot of traffic. Just that, if your product isn't a good fit, it definitely won't get a lot of traffic.
This is really useful and very well implemented gabemart, congrats. The "humans" is a big no-no for me but I see why some people might use it. That would be amazing if you had more stuff.. Maybe some relaxing instruments such as piano or acoustic guitar. Wind could be great too.
It's funny, I was watching House of Cards last night and during one scene there are crickets in the background and I found it very relaxing so I was just thinking about adding this sound.
I'll have a hunt for some appropriate samples. I have to do some back-end tweaks before I can add more sounds, though, because there's a practical limit to how many samples the browser can stream at once.
Thanks for this, it is amazing. I feel like I am on a ship, floating at sea, whilst coding. Something about it is very isolating, which is good for this open plan office.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadGo and find out where you customer hangs out online. Who already has your perfect audience on their mailing list? See if you can write something of value for their audience and tap into existing groups.
When you do get users, ask how they found you then double down on promoting in that channel.
Also, if your customers can find you without the assistance of search rankings (which can change at any time) then surely that's a good thing.
I'm an armchair entrepreneur for now (just getting that out of the way), but the advice I've seen over and over again can be generalized as: "Go out and talk to peope". You'll want to avoid starting with a sales pitch. Instead, talk to them about their business (or life) and see if your product is a fit (ie: don't try to sell a social network for cats to a dog owner). If it seems like there's some product fit, ask how they are filling the need now. If appropriate, give the the elevator pitch and a 1min demo on your live product. Ideally, convert them by having them sign up for a trial right then and there on your computer, followed by walking them through the COOLEST thing they can do on your product.
Rinse, repeat.
That's my 2 cents. Also interested what others think.
I want to point out the the above snippet assumes/implies a fairly deep knowledge of your intended audience, the problem space you are working in and several other things, any one of which might be the real problem as to why the OP is not getting traction.
Not a criticism. Just ...an elaboration, I guess.
You won't be a good golf club salesman if you know absolutely nothing about golf.
Getting out and taking to people, as you say, is where it is at, regardless of your business goals. Start with the three F's of fundraising (friends, family, fools) and go from there. Posting on Reddit and HN is good to create discussion or buzz, but it won't by itself get you sales.
Another thing I would recommend is that you do two things:
1. Write a marketing plan. Talk about the market, who you are going for, and how you will reach them. Discuss both PR and advertising, as well as other forms of outreach. Review it, write it as a team. Get everyone on the same page.
2. Then once that is done, put it on the shelf and don't look at it for a year. Act as if the plan doesn't exist. Go out and promote your product. Come back in a year and compare what you did and what you accomplished to what you set out in the plan.
To get our first 1000 I used a combination of Twitter, LinkedIn Groups and my own blog and newsletter
I think it was around 3 months so it wasn't as fresh but what I did was go through email addresses one by one, picked out the companies that sounded the most promising and opened up a dialogue to get those guys in early.
Then kept the other guys informed to try and keep them excited. Although if I would have done it just before launching I would have saved a lot of effort.
If you're in a specific field (e.g. online cello sales), do outreach to things like relevant forums and subreddits. You'll get targeted use which will provide quality feedback, hopefully. If it's a broad spectrum project, buy up relevant and cheap(ish) ads in several venues. Push use with some definable group that you can interact with directly, get emails via a newsletter, etc.
I've also had luck with some other niche community sites such as Designer News. The important piece here is to try and integrate yourself into the community instead of just spamming them with links to your website. Get involved in conversations about things other than your start-up (people notice this and appreciate it). Make friends with the moderators. When Designer News was still private with no search capabilities I wrote a quick search engine built on sphinx to index all of the posts and make them searchable. Not only did this get me an invite to the community but also sent some nice traffic to my start-ups site via a small link on the search page.
I've had little to no success with twitter and facebook, although I might be doing it wrong. Some of the targeted communities that you can find through google plus look somewhat promising, but I've yet to fully explore these.
Our most vocal power users are people we know personally, or met at local events (our local co-working space).
0. Identify and name your target group, e.g. commercial real estate agents in CA.
1. Find these people on Linkedin using advanced search option and invite them to connect.
2. Once connected you have their e-mail address, so send them a short e-mail (better response rate than InMails) describing the business problem and your solution. Short means 3-5 sentences, no attachments, just try to attract their attention.
3. Don't forget about follow-ups.
4. They will reply if interested and bam, you have a lead! Now it's time to set up a call and go into details.
5. Rinse and repeat. Stay persistent, you should send at least 20+ every day. Track response rates and adjust, you should achieve at least 5-10% easily.
If you have many competitors I am probably getting lot's of these e-mails which means you would have much harder time to get my attention.
Let's say you are a hosting provider, I probably would not like to get an e-mail from you offering me some good price or hard to understand feature of yours, because there are probably lot's of cheap hosting providers out there and every other provider is trying to differentiate themselves somehow. Other than "identifying my problem" you really shouldn't sound like giving me a sales pitch.
But if you noticed that, let's say I have 350ms response time in Asia when it's only 50 in USA and you have some solution for it, I probably will reply you even if I am not going to buy your service right away.
I'm sort of learning this point from others and trying to apply it to draw people's attention. I showed people that you need to build a private version of the web that stores the only information you are interested in or related to you. And we have a tool to help you create your Private Web with a few clicks. But I failed. Can you please pinpoint out why? The Kickstarter project is here: http://kck.st/JNqv8z
That reminds me of a technique I used when doing freelance Web design. I focused on restaurants with bad websites. I wrote a crawler that searched for restaurants with email addresses on the site, but bad html like font or center tags or flash. I would then email them a sample site with their name and logo inserted programmatically. It got pretty good response.
I get some cold emails that, while slightly disguised, boil down to: "a paper you wrote came up in a Google scholar search for 'Prolog', and we also have a logic and/or rule system that's great, pls see this website and let me know if you want any details on licensing". Those are not usually that interesting, since of course I know there are such systems out there, and can Google for them myself...
On the other hand, if you read in the Future Work section of a paper I wrote something along the lines of, "it'd be great if X existed, but it doesn't seem to", and you think you really have built something meeting the description of X, then emailing me saying so is usually quite interesting and non-generic.
If your solution really works, it should be an easy sell.
In a nutshell when he was building WPEngine he went to LinkedIn and found folks who were Wordpress consultants. He then sent them a follow email and said he's building a product for "folks like you and would love to talk to you about your pains, needs, etc" (customer development stuff) and offered to pay for their time. It worked well - he sent 40, 100% agreed to talk, actually talked to 38, and 0 asked for money. He suggests this worked so well because the offer to pay showed he was respectful of their time so they were happy to help. YMMV.
Based on my experience, it's very hard for people to accept something new in the first place, for example, when WP was introduced. And this is still happening now. Once a group of people accept a new concept, building on top of it to improve the system is a little easier.
OK. Thinking about it, there might have been a market there all along, but how come no one served it before? I mean Jason is crazy brilliant (talk to him, it's an experience!), but surely others could have come up with the same idea - right? I guess we'll never know, but my guess is that not too many people went out and searched for a thing like WPEngine before WPEngine
There are 75 million (!) WordPress sites in the world. It would be amazing if any software platform with 75 million users didn't have a large number of consultants available to help people with it.
http://en.wordpress.com/stats/
I managed got some ads etc. I will appreciate feedback :) and suggestions related with the site (it's not in english but it's extremely easy so it should be understandable).
I collected some thoughts on this that you might find helpful: http://lgilchrist.github.io/how_to_get_your_first_100_users/
TL:DR; - get a splash page up and start collecting emails - guest blog - particularly in places you know your would-be-users will read - organize an event - play around with paid marketing
1. Set up a blog on your domain
2. write 20+ articles on industry-related topics (this alone will bring in some traffic)
3. get a number of emails from prospective customers
4. write a PERSONALIZED email to everyone on the list and ask if they are interested in an interview to be published on your blog. Offer a link from your blog as additional incentive
My response rate so far was >80%
However, for my use case (i.e. emailing cold contacts) you usually don't get their address handed to you. I just looked them up with a combination of Yellow Pages and Google-Fu.
Now that I think of it, I could probably ask the people on my list for interviews. Thanks for the idea, Patrick :-)
HN is far, far away from our target audience, so posts here - even on the top of the front page - have gotten me pretty much 0 conversions. That's fine, though.
But yeah, I would think few startups would find the HN community a bullseye.
It's super early, but we've already gotten 500 users who are looking to beta test software and we've already started sending out codes.
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In essence: Go where your users hang out. With few exceptions, this is probably NOT the same place as where startup geeks hang out.
One example: my startup has a website for the Energy & Utilities industry. We got a bunch of early users by forming a partnership with a trade organization for energy providers.
It's not the sort of deal that "easy" in that it took real work to put together. But I think it's worked out great for everyone.
Another key thing is to understand the community. There is radical cultural diversity between subreddits which manifests in very different reactions to self-promotion. It's essential to engage appropriately and respectfully.
Something I've used for other projects is searching for coverage of competitors in the same space, then pitching to people who have already featured them. Again, very important to hand-tailor each pitch and offer value to the person you're contacting.
For the life of me, though, I haven't been able to remember the name the last couple time's I've wanted it (and my bookmarks are horrendously disorganized at the moment), and googling different iterations of "white noise generator sliders people birds rain" didn't yield success. I need to stash this away somewhere I won't lose it...
I have actually wondered about the name thing. It is a little whimsical, and I guess it would be easy to mix up with lots of similar descriptions like "a quiet buzz" or "a gentle burble". From that perspective, it might have been better to choose something more memorable.
The site won't rank well in google for descriptive terms because it doesn't contain a lot of text. Even for terms it does contain, it doesn't do very well (e.g. it ranks at ~20 for "ambient noise" in google US). I haven't worried about that so far because the large majority of the traffic is direct, social or for the exact term "a soft murmur".
Based on your other comments it seems like you really know what you're doing in these spaces. I'm no expert, but based on all the positive feedback, capturing organic search traffic could help you kill it. Show them and they'll stick.
And the luck/chance involved :) basically, the votes a new link gets in first 30mins largely decides whether it will make to front page or not. More specifically, the first upvote because then social proof kicks in (hey it must be good if someone liked it).
So while posting to HN/Reddit might help to kick in, I would take it more as 'good if it hits, fine if it doesn't'.
To add similar services I've been using for quite a while:
http://www.noisli.com/ (very nice UI with changing background colour, a distration free editor and so on)
http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/ (quite professional)
I'll have a hunt for some appropriate samples. I have to do some back-end tweaks before I can add more sounds, though, because there's a practical limit to how many samples the browser can stream at once.
Thanks very much for your suggestion!
Thanks again!