Build a free application that draws people in to the site. Not necessarily like the freemium model, just offer something cool for free. Either give away great software, or become an authoritative source of data, or both.

This worked amazingly well for me with my fantasy football website. I made software to let people do free mock drafts. Over the last five years it's grown substantially with virtually zero advertising. I then sell premium fantasy football software to those visitors. Also, I aggregate data and have become a reliable source that people link to. Building the free app and becoming a source of data has led to my site becoming the #1 result in Google for just about any search term that I care about.

It's sort of a twist on the freemium model. The conversion rate is very low, but the customer acquisition cost is virtually zero, so it is still profitable.

Scalable content creation for organic SEO. I'm a two trick pony for customer acquisition, and this is my better trick. (#2 is AdWords.)

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/07/17/seo-for-software-compani...

Repeatability is a core, baked-in element of the strategy.

If you blog it, they will come?

The only repeatable processes you should implement are:

1. Identifying your customer 2. Creating a fulfilling customer experience

Now there's a ton of ways to support #2, but if you've truly understood #1 you know which ways to follow with. The hard part is making the experience consistent yet unique for each customer/customer type you have. Measure everything, or create proxy measures and plan before acting.

This went through HN recently and it's a great article actually. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1610540

Hi, I agree that it's a great article, but PR seems to be a one-time (or few-time) thing that cannot really be translated into a repeatable process that I can do day in and day out.