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A comment on Ask YC: How do you get the word out about your product?.

Re:Ask YC: How do you get the word out about your product? by axod on Sunday April 20, 2008 @01:03PM (#168521)
I'd say this is a good recipe (Not speaking from a lot of experience, but the theory seems sound to me :/ ):

1. Make it so good people want to tell others about it. It can't be an "hmm, yeah I guess that might be useful later. I'll bookmark it". It has to be a "Woahhhhh I've been looking for this exact thing for years. So have my friends I bet. I need to use this now, and tell my friends what I found". (A hard ask, but it's nice to aim for that 'wow' factor).

2. Make the base product free, and politely refuse donations. Ask people to simply tell their friends about it. I think people kinda feel guilty about having a cool product for free, so they become evangelists for it, and help you sell it.

Having said that, it's good to get something to start off. Look at websites/domains that are related, and have been neglected... Send emails, make an offer, buy domain, get traffic. It's not a sure fire thing - some people still believe domain names to be worth millions whatever they are. But you can pick up some real gems. More likely to be sustainable traffic unlike tc/reddit/etc mentions.

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Re:Ask YC: How do you get the word out about your product? by optimal on Sunday April 20, 2008 @01:31PM (#168544)
Hey axod, comment and a question:

I believe Remember the Milk would fall into this category.

Does anybody know how they're doing? Back in March they said they're up to 500k users. I wonder how many upgraded to the $25 Pro account. Two percent maybe? That would mean $250k in revenues (spread among several people over several years). Just something I was pondering the other day!

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Re:Ask YC: How do you get the word out about your product? by shiranaihito on Sunday April 20, 2008 @03:09PM (#168605)
> "Woahhhhh I've been looking for this exact thing for years. So have my friends I bet. I need to use this now, and tell my friends what I found"

- That sounds more like Facebook!

Are you sure that the "hmm, that might be useful" -reaction is not good enough?

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Re:Ask YC: How do you get the word out about your product? by axod on Sunday April 20, 2008 @07:05PM (#168834)
Just speaking from my own experience. If I say to myself "Yeah that might be useful", I bookmark it, and probably never get around to looking at it again.
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