You are building a business. It does not spring from your forehead like Athena, or get pooped out of your pet Nibbler like Dark Matter on Futurama. Listen to what everyone else here has to say. Sure, pick something with favorable long-tail SEO dynamics. Sure, pick something with a viral loop. Sure, build yourself a tribe.

But then, for god's sake, pick something you can stick with, nurture, protect, and grow over the long run. That thing you don't have, that you keep calling "a fucking great idea"? Most of us call it "a winning lottery ticket". Stop thinking about playing the lottery. Get back to work.

FogCreek was a wee little consultancy which got the market shot out from under it which launched a product that nobody cared about which happened to produce an industrial biproduct which, ten years later, employs a few dozen developers in an office next door to the New York Stock Exchange.

My software -- which is not nearly on the scale of either of the above businesses -- launched to all of 116 visitors. Four and a half years of very, very part-time work later, it pays my salary. (It will sell the hundred thousandth dollar worth of software some time before Halloween.) I'm happy as a clam and getting the next adventure ready as we speak.

Totally agree with you point though.

I'd say one thing - Techcrunch is definitely NOT the only game in town for PR. They are very fickle and clique-y. There are huge startups that never made a dent in TC. PR is all about building buzz from the ground up, exclusives are a load of crap and mostly reserved for established players anyhow.

If you're not getting any coverage from anywhere, yes maybe there's something at the core that isn't compelling (and you need to talk to customers / users first to determine that), but chances are you aren't spending enough time sending fun personal emails to lower-level bloggers and journalists. If you aren't in the elite old-boys club, you shouldn't be focused on approaching the journalists who are.

But PR and "viral" launches are hard work. The idea of the massively hockey-stick organic viral launch is largely a myth propagated by a few outliers (aka survivor bias).

And good PR does not make a success, either. I've built 2 things that made big PR splashes (everything BUT TC haha) and neither landed me either fame or fortune. The one product was blogged about by the New York freakin Times, and it never achieved escape velocity. PR isn't a long-term marketing strategy. Its a one-time high and believe me the downslope doesn't feel good either

Honestly, there are 2 types of folks who make it: the lucky ones, and the persistent ones. Its hard as hell (and heck I haven't beaten it yet) but you have to ignore the burnout and be one of the persistent ones

Best entrepreneurial quote ever IMO.

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common that unsuccessful individuals with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."

It doesn't matter, of course, in this context, so thanks for the heads up.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%2Bdetermination-alone+%2Bfb-...

He was a merchant who moved from Chicago to Los Angeles and wrote the little-known official song of California:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_You,_California

If you sell pianos, find musicians.

If you sell coupons, find local restaurants.

What are you selling that's gonna go on TC?

Though I think the draw to TC is probably more about building buzz for investors than anything else

Let me tell you about a fine English gentleman by the name of Joe Ades, now sadly no longer with us. Joe wore Savile Row suits and lived in a three-bedroomed apartment on Park Avenue. He spent most nights at the Café Pierre with his wife, sharing a bottle of his usual - Veuve Clicquot champagne. You might assume that Joe was a banker or an executive, but in fact Joe sold potato peelers on the street for $5 each, four for $20.

I urge you, I implore you, I beg you, stop what you're doing and watch Joe in action - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCUct4NlxE0

That is what business looks like. Sometimes, once in a million, you luck upon a product so amazing the world beats a path to your door. For most of us, the best we can hope for is to be some chump with a thousand boxes of vegetable peelers. Anybody can sit out on the street with a box of peelers, but Joe sold them. Joe made his peelers sing, he made them seem like magic. He took a humble piece of stamped metal and created theatre. He did something so simple and strange and wonderful that people would buy a fistful of his peelers, just so they could tell their friends about this little Englishman they saw in Union Square.

Look at the Fortune 500, tell me what you see. I see grocery stores, drugstores, oil companies, banks, a funny little concern that sells sugar water. I see a whole lot of hard work and very few great ideas.

Forget about striking it big with a great idea, it's just as childish and naïve as imagining that the tape you're recording in your garage is going to make you a rockstar. Get out there and talk to customers. Find out what they need, what annoys them, what excites them. Build the roughest, ugliest piece of crap that you can possibly call a product. If you're not ashamed of it, you've spent too long on it. Try and sell it. Some people will say "I'm not buying that piece of crap, it doesn't even do X". If X isn't stupid, implement X. Some people, bizarrely, will say "yes, I will buy your piece of crap". It is then and only then that you are actually developing a product. Until you've got a customer, it's just an expensive hobby. Paying customer number one is what makes it a product.

To wit, regarding the OP's main point:

- selling potato peelers is not a "fucking great idea" by any means.

- selling potato peelers in a $1000 suit, in manhattan, as a chirpy english gentlemen IS a fucking great idea.

it's an idea that sells itself, you basically touched on the same point as the OP. He did something so simple and strange and wonderful that people would buy a fistful of his peelers, just so they could tell their friends about this little Englishman they saw in Union Square. You have to be a little crazy, be a little disruptive, and that's going to get you your audience.

Thank you so much for reminding me of him.

That guy's a better salesman dead than most people on Earth.

I think you could put it better: Your idea has to be something people feel they want and will use. People don't want a drill; they want a hole in the wood. Joe Ades didn't sell a potato peeler; he sold a way to get your kids to eat their veggies, a way to make great french fries.

Have a fucking great idea

Nonsense. How the fuck do you know it's a great idea? Your ego. I'm sorry but you won't know (can't know) if it is what people want or need. No one does. Trust me, the music industry and film industry would love to know when they will have a hit.

But unlike film and music we can iterate. Take your ego out and let people tell you what they want. Try to understand their core desire and work with that. Ignore funding. You're begging for TechCrunch coverage? Unless your market is "people who read TC", you're wasting you're time. Apply any way you can to those people directly in your market. And if you don't know who they are or how to do that, stop and go back to your day job. Because the software business is not about the software; it's about the business.

Hard work is important, knowing the right people helps.

That is why customer development is so important. You need to understand what your customer does and show them that you can make that part of their life easier. For enterprise software its the same, prove to a company that you can actually reduce or eliminate a pain point and BOOYA you have a sale and once you have sales, you get press when you get press you get more sales and the cycle continues until you exit gracefully.

You should work hard to make a great product. If you don't know how to make a great product and don't have to patience to learn, go work for someone that does.

And at some point in the video he mentions pineapples... surely you don't eat the skin of pineapples?

There are very few products out there that we need and cannot be substituted.

I've got a perfectly sharp knife in my kitchen, but after watching the sales genius in the above video, I feel like I NEED to get one of his carrot peelers.

Having the perception of value is THE necessary condition to selling your product.

Having actual value may create this perception of value, but this is not necessarily so. I've seen several products including a few startups here on this site that I KNOW have great value, due to my own close observation. But there are many potentials customers who don't immediately see this value after casual review, or don't know about it.

Reality is perception.

I'm terribly sorry, but not everyone's purpose is to make great products that help mankind. Some people just wanna get rich.

Perhaps this is a bit of an oversimplification? The reason those particular concerns are still on top is that they had plenty of great ideas in addition to execution. You don't stay a top oil company without kickass geophysicists, for example.

exhaustedhacker, I feel for you, but since when is TechCrunch to bouncer or doorman to your success? No ones fortunes should be dependent on Michael Arrington. Instead of taking time to craft emails for him and his staff him, spend sometime crafting emails to targeted users. You said that you have had some success from meetups, do more of that, fight for every user. Give out a few free trial accounts to influencers, such as to folks here on YC. Reach out to other disrupters, Mashable, This Week in Startups, etc. If you don't have time to blog about your, you can contract folks for $10-20 a post.

Good luck, and thanks for sharing!

This needs restating, as it is THE moment when you have validated your business. Everything you do at first should be focused on selling your first piece of crap.

He has a noticeable working class accent. The term "English Gent" usually assumes what the English call "upper middle class" or Americans call "upper class". Joe schtick worked because of Americans lack of familiarity with English culture.

Nevertheless moving his sales pitch to New York was master stroke. Like selling ice cream in the desert,

37Signals have an ok product. What makes it truly successful is their incredible marketing machine. From highly popular blogs to podcasts, videocasts to books, super-optimised A/B tested websites to entire, hugely popular web development frameworks associated with them... they've got their marketing to a level that takes a decade of intelligence, opportunities and hard work to achieve.

"Basecamp is the top choice for entrepreneurs, freelancers, small businesses, and groups inside big organizations."

Total marketing. Says nothing about the product... but it connects if you're one of these types of people, making you feel like they must know something regardless of what the product even is.

True. But on this net....

"as long as you can't put the relevant link into the place where people go -- then you can't even begin to compete."

You are doing it backwards. Start with the market first. Your idea is only as good as it applies to the market it serves. You should not have spent 60k on a developer, you should have spent it leveraging a way to talk to your proposed customers.

Yes I agree, shit products get sold all day every day and rake in billions. But you see the product may be shit BECAUSE everything else is so much more important. The system, the sales force, the production line, the logistics, the tracking. I love Mcdonald's. Nah not their food, their system.

I know you are just venting and now may not be the best time to say "you are doing it wrong", but well, it actually is the best time.

You are doing it wrong. I know because I've done it wrong for a long time too! I actually am more of a programmer than a business guy but its kind of funny... "I want to run a business" kind of entails that we think more like business men and less like programmers.

Best of luck to you. STOP doing shit that doesn't work and doesn't matter.

If you want to avoid this experience again, choose an idea that:

1) Has a broad-content SEO strategy (think StackOverflow and Yelp). New/valuable content gets created every day.

2) Has a channel for "buying" customers with economics that work. Plenty of people make adwords work. Plenty of others can afford salespeople. Find a market where people are succeeding at buying customers and compete in it.

3) Has a viral loop. Think Farmville or Groupon. Why is it in your customers best interest to evangelize your product? They can be motivated by psychology or $.

4) Create a "tribe". Read up on Seth Godin. Look at Joel Spolsky, 37Signals, etc. They sell good (NOT great) products because they've accumulated followers and evangelists.

It's not about a "great idea". Well, it can be. But look at all of the shitty products that are minting money! You can aim for a "addictive/amazing" product (and should), but it better be backed by sound customer acquisition economics for the (likely) case that your product is merely good.

About your launch day: You expect to blow it out on launch day? That's not a reasonable expectation. It's a marathon not a 100 yard dash.

edit: TechCrunch should not be a goal. At YC there's a word for the period after TechCrunch coverage... "The trough of despair". It's the period of time after TC where your traffic flatlines and you realize that TC isn't a springboard to anything-- it's just the first step (if you're lucky) on a really long slog to building a business.

Maybe his idea, with a 10 degree pivot, could be a viral/SEO sensation. I've no idea.

But certainly some ideas lend themselves better to cheap/free customer acquisition.

GREAT snippet from Patio11's blog (paraphrasing Seth Godin):

"Specifically, he says that the software business is undergoing radical changes because technical competence is no longer a scarce commodity: with open source tools, an increasing supply of trained programmers, and the explosion of cost-lowering innovations for creating and marketing software on the Internet, things which were previously the purview of a technical elite are now within what talented teenagers can cook up from their kitchen table."

A good web app is really only the "entrance fee" to the more challenging (and longer term) game of building a business.

5) Makes sense for other companies to promote to their customers. Ideally ones with lots of customers.

Bonus points: your product fits in to their customer acquisition process (i.e. helps generate more revenue for them).

Triple bonus points: you have access to a large number of these companies through a small number of entry points. For instance a trade association or a friend that will introduce you.

You wouldn't believe how easy it is to get your product out there in the above situation. PR is the last thing you worry about.

I've tried in the past like you to get on TC and I was unsuccessful. The truth is I tried sending emails to all the "big name" blogs and nada.

I learned a different approach very quickly. I found that if you approach the "small" blogs, they're much more open to covering you. Then using that small amount of coverage as leverage, you approach more well known blogs.

Doing that, I managed to go from not hearing from TC in one week, to having the top story on Yahoo UK's homepage for an entire day the next.

It wasn't easy, it was a shit ton of emails that I wrote, all carefully crafted and targeted to each individual blogger I approached.

In a month the site went from idea, to launch, to 440k uniques (racking up 2.6 million pageviews) to being sold off for quite a tidy profit given it had a very short shelf life.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1918270/traffic-08.png

Anyway, my advice would be to not to give up, just change tactics and approach the smaller guys first, build a solid foundation and work your way from there.

Also, take my advice with a grain of salt as I mentioned I'm no marketing genius.

The first thing you need to do is make your product compelling. There is a reason for all the talk about rapid iteration, minimum viable product, and the lean startup; creating a compelling product is hard. There is no formula for it, and customers are infuriatingly fickle. It's hard enough with established markets for things people really need (eg. food, toiletries, houses, cell phones), but when you're creating something brand new there's this huge hurdle to get people to understand how it fits into their life. There's no telling what will make something compelling, so you need to just put something out and iterate on it. Get 5 customers, get 10 customers. If these people find your product compelling and can give you real world feedback and evangelize the product, that is worth more than 50,000 visits from bored TCers who spend 5 minutes then jump to the next story.

I recently benefited from just that - I was debating applying to YC, decided not to due to our family situation (just bought a house, adopting one kid, fostering 2 others, own an annoying poodle) and my wife said "hey, you know what, give it a shot. We'll make it work".

"In just 8 months without any funding we went from zero to a beautiful system, signed up a couple of early customers by attending local meetups and events, and prepared for a Big Day."

That is your first and foremost problem. You cannot go into a cave and develop your product with no significant marketing or at least a soft launch. You're going to end up building the wrong thing (or even worse, find out the idea was crap all along).

You need to launch an MVP ASAP. And a lot of times, that MVP is only just a landing page (with no other functionality)! If you don't get any signups or excitement, that is reason to pause.

That's not an MVP, that's a Dry Test. There's a difference.

Open source your software, generalize it, and push it so that anyone can set it up. Make it easy to install, and make it do what it says it can do really well.

Sure, it's not the best way to get rich. I've been working on the open source social networking software, Appleseed, for about 6 years now, and it's been a massive effort with very little financial gain. But your measure of success can change, you can subvert the typical questions of press and fame and fortune that have come to define success, and see success in other ways.

And it's not perfect. I had been working on Appleseed for half a decade when Diaspora managed to raise $200k on the same idea by having the connections and press I couldn't get. But in the world of open source, there is still a level of meritocracy that you don't see in the start-up world: Either your software works, or it doesn't, and they may have had $200k, but I had 13 years of professional experience, and a 6 year head start, and when you're measured in code, hype can only get you so far.

You may even see your open source software put the fear of God into that mediocre LA competitor with all the press and venture capital, which just personally would make me feel better.

The one thing my father always said that I had to relearn with life experience is "it's not about what you know, it's about who you know". It's a very frustrating truism, but there are ways to sidestep it. It just requires some creativity and willingness to play outside of the rules.

And of course, you never know, if your open source software gains traction, you might find it easier to start a company from there, since you'll have gained respect, notoriety, and social connections from that work.

If you want press, think about your story and make it a good one.

They definitely had connections, what with Eben Moglen of the EFF backing them, and them getting an article in the New York Times, that kind of thing doesn't happen without some kind of connections. A lot of that was probably just a result of being NYU students. I was working as a pizza delivery driver in Baltimore City (home of The Wire) when I started Appleseed, so I'm sure they have me one-upped in the social capital department.

At some point, a story may matter, but right now, I'm focusing on building the software out, and accomplishing what people are looking for. Appleseed has more features completed than they even have in their roadmap, it's way easier to install, it's extensible (a framework, not just an app), and I've got design documents and specs for the next year of development and beyond, including a mobile API, client-side apps, and distributed search (the holy grail of open social networking).

The great thing about open source is that the press can come later, I can take the time to focus on building the software first, and there isn't the same first-to-market requirement that startups have. I'm not necessarily trying to get users to sign up, I'm trying to get administrators to install it. And that requires a certain level of polish and feature-set.

Users don't have to care about Appleseed anymore than they care about what Joomla or Drupal is, so that's the advantage of being more mature than the competition.

Of course, at this point, I'm not really looking at Diaspora as my competition anyways, I'm looking towards Facebook.

Keep up the good work, I firmly believe that a framework for distributed social apps will be the future. I would love something like Google Latitude but without Google getting my location, and then I could choose who to update and in what manner...

http://developer.appleseedproject.org/michael.chisari/

Here's a test site for the latest code:

http://gotham.appleseedproject.org/bruce/

My impression is that a lot of comments are just restatements of the usual clichés: "get the first paying customer", "luck vs perseverance", "minimum viable product", "execution vs great ideas", etc.

As someone who has already asked this kind of question on HN, that type of cookie-cutter advice really isn't helpful at all (assuming you have been following HN for a while).

We need more specific, actionable advice. Here is mine:

</rant>

Grab a copy of "The Four Steps to the Epiphany"[1] by Steven Blank and apply his methodology. It's broadly a "How-to" guide on discovering who your customers are, what they really want and how to make them buy. According to your story, it seems you are focusing too much on getting PR when you really should go out your office and talk with your customers directly (instead of via TC).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...

The problem, then, is that every time somebody is seeking this advice, they use a throw-away account and talk about their business in vague generalities.

It's impossible to give specific, actionable advice when you have no idea about the specifics of the problem.

My suggestions for AdSense would be to spend $500 at once rather than trickling the money out. This gives Google enough knowledge of your conversion rates that you can switch to pay-per-conversion. Bear in mind that you also have to be ruthless about excluding websites where you aren't going to get any conversions during your pay-per-click period. So track your spend daily and exclude-exclude-exclude sites that don't convert. I don't know if you've done this, but it basically halved our advertising costs and turned us from advertising at a loss into advertising more or less at cost (perhaps profitably assuming word of mouth, etc.).

Good luck!

Thanks for the tip!

True for you and many others but not a universal truth by a long shot. Blogging is far from a time consuming activity if you're both a reasonable writer and neck deep in the subject matter. Let's just take an example that sat on the front page of HN for most of today:

http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2010/10/21/why-we-dont-sch...

232 words. And as my own blog was on the front page a similar length of time today, I'm confident they got at least 2000 pageviews from that (I got 5000) and I know I've seen several posts of theirs do well here. Yet if you check their blog, they have several posts per month at most, none are very long or technical.

Other startups like SeatGeek and MailChimp nail the blogging in a similar way. There's no way they're not getting some serious exposure with them, yet it seems in most cases it's regular techs updating the blog and not some team of "noise" generating PR flacks.

Small Blogs are about personal brand, long tail keywords and SEO benefits. I sometimes talk about products, sometimes post big ideas, sometimes post about failure.

My guess as to your problems would be lack of customer contact the whole way through. Without knowing the problem domain, if you're concentrating on getting 'industry' PR like TechCrunch, you're probably concentrating on the wrong people. Assuming there is some type of vertical you're targeting (travel, photography, vehicles, whatever) thenyou should be making moves in that part.

My final thoughts on the matter : it would never even occur to me to try and get TechCrunch coverage or anything like that. I would just be trying how to work out how to find customers that pay. If you've spent a fortune on google ads, then you should at least know what works as a click through and what hooks to start working around. It's either bad conversions or a bad product. PR coverage won't fix either of those.

If that doesn't work iterate and launch again.

In your story, I didn't see anything about sales efforts beyond "signed up a couple of early customers." Perhaps that was the missing link. It seems you relied on PR tactics, rather than finding, choosing, and closing customer deals one by one.

FWIW, word-of-mouth marketing usually feels like a total crapshoot. Topical, often trivial ideas seem to do the best. And honestly Techcrunch doesn't help as much as you may think. They're good for a spike of 5-10k users, but much more important is your willingness to support an unpopular product for another 6-12 months. Because it will be unpopular. :-p

You might not feel comfortable linking to your company here but I'd love to see what you're working on. I put my email address in my profile, maybe I can offer some feedback.

To get early customers I like the domino theory that Clayton Christensen first described in his book Crossing the Chasm (assuming you have built a product that solves an actual, difficult to solve customer problem that is worth paying for):

1. Start with one (paying customer), that customer then; 2. Gives a testimonial that you can use to sell other similar customers and; 3. Actually provides you names (and sometimes even actual referrals) of other customers you can sell to.

As you build reference customers it gets easier to sell to other customers because now you start to get a rep as a must have in that particular industry.

Nowhere in your posting do I see anything about "we have X number of customers" or "we worked with X number of customers when developing our product". If you spent $60k plus your own time developing a product before showing it to any customers it's possible that there is no need for the product, and that more than anything may be why you are not getting the response you want from either investors, "journalists" or customers.

I know how this can happen, I've been there myself! (It seemed like a good idea when we started building it, how come nobody wants to buy?)

[edit] Wait. You missed having yourself or your family getting sick. Or maybe you live someplace with socialized health care.

The cognitive dissonance of working on a silly web app while worrying about something as fundamental as my family's well-being in case of illness or accident: that would really, really tear me apart.

This is the only thing here I agree with.

TC is rather useless in the grand scheme of things. If not being able to get on TC is your marketing strategy then you need to rethink it.

Much of PR is about having the right connections. This doesn't mean you must have grabbed a beer with Arrington before but just having met and chatted briefly with a writer irl is helpful in getting PR

If they don't matter and you like Scala or Clojure or Ruby and you enjoy writing code in that language and you get stuff done, over anything else, then at least there's no real reason not to.

You don't need TechCrunch's permission to launch a successful company, which is basically just as difficult if you get it.

Good luck.

Sign me: Baffled.

Thanks.

(Yeah, I'm having one of THOSE days.)

Your launch is not the be all and end all, it's the beginning of a long hard slog. Look at the likes of Bingo Card Creator and Balsamiq. Why would Bingo Card Creator belong on TechCrunch? Rather than focusing on one site, you need to work on a long term plan to raise profile within your target market. The last thing you want is a load of uninterested visitors looking for the thing between now and the next big thing. If you business is relevant to it and it's ready, the likes of TechCrunch will come to you. In the meantime focus on the niches within your target market.

For example, my company sells two things - Penetration Testing and Incident Response. We're very, very good at it, but not many people know about us in our target markets because we (some might say) foolishly were a little bashful about promoting ourselves. Some of that was a product of size and structure, but most of it was that we were taking the wrong approach. We've picked a niche (GCSX CoCo Health Checks - I know, interesting stuff right?) and have started marketing it offline and online. Have a look at http://www.mandalorian.com/services/penetration-testing/gcsx... - That's one A/B tested page for one niche (GCSX CoCo Testing) within a niche (Penetration Testing) within a niche (Information Security). We're a B2B consultancy so we tend not to do things like blogging (at least so far) as it has the potential to be a time sink. Instead we focus on winning business in a target sector or niche, which is what you should be doing.

Our campaign has an initial ramp period, sustained promotion for a reasonable period and then will enter a business as usual setup. Persistence and testing is what will get you the results your after, Not Michael Arrington.

None of that stuff dictates what is successful, and most of them are wrong most of the time for the negligible % of startups they touch. It'd be nice to have that coverage or that network or that money, but all that really matters is you, your product and your users/customers.

Unfortunately, that's how it works and if somebody says it's not true they are not belonging in your category.

I think the main think I noticed was that OTHER startups getting funded was actually good for ME, since it validated the product and people started to google around for alternatives. They made the beginner mistakes I already passed. Only sales I did was $10 a day on adwords, just to get some traffic going.

So: don't give up too soon.

You can't count on a blessing from above. Those are venues for pitching to investors, not pitching to users. You gotta go ground up with forums, blogs, twitter, email.

Create quotas for yourself of the minimum number of people you talk to on each per day about your site. Signup for lots of forums, start posting in said forums. Seriously don't underestimate forums, they are still big because they are the ideal many-to-many venue of communication surrounding one topic. These are communities that are clearly labeled. You know instantly what kind of users are on there and how to cater your marketing to them. Although forums tend to be around more physical goods and concerns, if your application domain is productivity or something more abstract start hitting up bloggers non-stop.

First, and foremost, I feel with you. I (never stepped out of a "normal" job so far) admire all you guys that have the balls to try that, to risk your savings for something you consider a chance to move something big. There are quite some stories about failures here, but usually they are presented as "lessons". Your post, emotionally, seems to be more like a resignation.[1] That's why I want to wish you all the best.

The second reaction is kind of twisted/evil: I wonder if "I'm a solo founder, didn't go to Stanford, in my mid 30s" is enough to basically identify you to the right people - i.e. YC. I'm not even sure if that would be something you want (Trying to advertise for your idea once more) or not (Missing that fact while venting)..

1: English isn't my native tongue either, and text sucks for emotional conversations anyway. I might be wrong.

It's not easy. Good luck!! Hope you stick with it.

What's touched upon in various ways in all the comments is that "PR" and "Media Coverage" is not the end all be all. In fact the successfully software startups I know STILL email individual potential customers on a daily basis.

I think one of the great myths of the internet is that you should just create a product, throw it up on the internet with some SEO and AdWords and the customers will come. Sure it might work for a few people, but by and large you are still growing a business. And you often grow a business one person at a time, hopefully later you can learn to scale sales.

Often what is missing from people's MVP's and business plans is how are you going to very specifically market to your target customers, and what the cost of customer acquisition is. If you can't identify a way to find your target customer, you're going to have a problem. Again, I don't think general SEO and SEM is going to work.

Don't give up on your idea, start emailing people. 50, 100 people a day. Convert them one at a time. If your business idea is not specifically just some sexy piece of technology, direct mail may work too (if you don't also have to educate people on why they need your product.)

Journalist want to write about what's hot, not about what is a potentially decent idea in a decent market. They want to talk about iphones, ipads, and facebook, and the latest jargon.

Anyways, start finding your target customers and email them. Don't worry about email campaign tools and crazy stuff, just starting email or calling them one at a time. Building a web based software business doesn't mean you can just skip sales.

Each time I ship something, I'm discovering that I could have cut things down much further than I did and saved (months/weeks/days) of effort, and just wasn't ready to believe it in the planning stages.

Plus, moving fast gives me more opportunities to work on marketing skills and gain some real experience there. Project artifacts have zero real value until someone is using them, so the marketing effort is a way to mitigate risk, and shouldn't be an "oh my god did we get it right?" shuttle-launching kind of experience. If you feel like it's a shuttle launch, you may have taken on too much risk(for a web app).

I disagree that me and you should give up. We have learned more from our failures that most entrepreneurs would have learned for their short-lasting success. It's time to introspect, write down a list of todos that will make your product better, talk to a bunch of users and see why they are hating your product and get back to coding.

You are just in mid-30s and you are going to live for atleast 50 more years. Hang in there for a decade.

While there will always be the silver spoon fed types who really "know" people, you can go a long way networking and being social. Not social networking. Get off your machine and go to events, conferences, where-ever the action is and make friends with people who can help you, and presumably who you can help too.

I know it is really hard to shift focus from the product and socialize, especially as a single founder. You have grown so accustomed to the efficiency of the Internet that any offline PR or networking seems like a grand old waste of time. I am guilty of that too. But I realize that many entrepreneurs have a competitive advantage by virtue of their social connections. Whether it be in the form of an introduction to a venture capitalist at a party or lunch with a tech journalist.

So I suggest you don't throw in the towel just yet. You now have a product. And obviously a supportive wife after four years. Drop the code for awhile. Step back and reassess where you are focusing your energy to steer your company towards a brighter future. It is not an easy or short road to follow. But if you really want it, you will get there.

"Though a tree that falls in a forest and is not heard makes no sound, still, it falls."

I would suggest you stop worrying about press and worry about reaching individuals users. Word of mouth and all that. For inspiration, you might read the story here behind this guy's business:

http://shop.johnnycupcakes.com/story/

(I saw this on HN somewhere previously. Thanks to whomever posted it before me.)

I am very much doing the grass-roots thing for one of my projects. I get a lot of flack and relatively little positive response. I actively discourage people from heaping public praise upon me because it causes nothing but trouble. I am frequently discouraged. But the humble, reaching out to the people approach I am taking is gradually working whereas attention-mongering never did anything but backfire and alienate people. Whatever you are doing is unlikely to be as touchy a topic as what I am doing, so you probably don't need to bend over backwards to avoid "good press" when it does come. You may just need to look for other means to validate that you are getting somewhere. Press is not everything.

Good luck with this.

As for TechCrunch, that seems brutal that they can hold you hostage like that

It's not the sound but the silence that bothers me. Constantly wondering whether a lack of responses indicates that something is wrong (requiring a pivot), or that I haven't stayed the course long enough for my current strategy to pay off.

What matters is customers, and you get customers because they know about you, and they learn about you through marketing.

To rephrase what you're emphasizing:

"Market the fuck out of your great idea"

Be everywhere, talk to everyone, always be selling. Don't be "viral", be invasive. Show up, pitch, and close. Get deals not by word of mouth, but by being there.

Make noise. Create spectacle. Generate exposure.

People forget that things like Twitter are not only products, but platforms that literally market themselves. Marketing is baked into their idea. Facebook went "viral" only because it capitalized on people's inherent narcissism. Most products don't have this luxury.

Always be promoting.

Too many companies have failed simply because they forgot to tell people about what they were doing.

In VC it's "team, market, product".

In most cases people are happy to give you their reason why they think it's not such a great investment.

You might want to go back to people's reasons for rejection and make sure you took away the right lessons learned.

If there's some underlying oddball reason they're unable to articulate clearly, like you didn't pass due diligence because they have you confused with a mass murderer of the same name, or the reasons are otherwise it might help to work with an intermediary who is familiar with the VC process. Either your experience should put you in touch with possible mentors/board of advisors, or as a last resort you could give someone with a record of success a stake contingent on getting you over whatever hurdle is blocking you.

If you want to build a business, then you need a real plan for sales and marketing. Doing these well is just as hard as writing code. It takes a lot of careful thought, and it often takes money.

Even if you got your one-time appearance in TC, you'd find it wasn't enough. You need a sustainable strategy for acquiring customers. You need to calculate that the money you get from each customer is ultimately more than it costs to acquire them. Depending on your market, you may need a lot of money up-front to build a sustainable business.

These things don't take care of themselves. There's no simple one-time solution like showing up on TechCrunch. If you want a business, you have to build it.

humour

Truth is your product probably didn't have a great "good name".

See starting at 5:18 in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzJmTCYmo9g -- that's about the subprime market. hilarious.

So, as the video demonstrates: no fucking great idea can challenge a really great "good name"

To make my point, let's put an example (me). Take a commodity idea. Say "a wiki". And then name it "SimplyWiki", or, adding some trickery, "SimpliWiki".

Now your get a great "good name" and it is the only thing that really matters.

/humour

Well... some persistence is good too, as mentioned before, so... keep trying and remember to have fun, it's easier to persist in doing fun things.

Your focus becomes your reality.

Never get in your own way.

So: What do you want your reality to be? Focus on it. Figure out how to get there. Never give up.

And, don't get in your own way by becoming your own worst enemy and defeating yourself mentally before your competitors.

I've made a lot of money over the years and have also lot is all to the point of going bankrupt twice (as in, having to file bankruptcy, rinso, everything gone). Still, I would not change any of it. Not one bit. Either this is in your bloodstream or it isn't.

Sad to hear your story. But that how it is down here on earth. No one cares. Really.

You should forget about TC, YC and 'a big launch'. You should've just launched. Do whatever you can to let the world know about your product. I think HN is a good place, and proggit too. I know you did that once. But perhaps it's the third attempt is the one that's gonna make the difference. The second, if we are lucky (I said 'we', you are not alone :))

So launch. Have faith in yourself. Give it some time. I wish you very good luck.

Sure, it's easy to say "focus on the business" and "don't give up" but maybe what you're doing is a losing proposition from the beginning -- and maybe you SHOULD give up!

Who knows, maybe you should have given up before you ever started? It's hard to say without knowing any real facts ... :(

Your biggest problem: taking eight months to "launch". If it's not sellable after a week, why spend eight months on it? You should start making money as soon as possible.

That means making the simplest, fastest-to-develop product and putting it out there. Don't change a thing until you have paying customers giving you feedback. If that day never comes, move on, and take your savings with you.

The #1 thing you need to do is find a way to sustain yourself and your energy through the long slog - Paul Graham's "How Not to Die"

The #2 thing you need to do is build relationships with customers and understand who's problem you're solving and how you're going to do it.

Figuring out how to make forward progress is easier than figuring out how not to give up and how to get anyone to give a shit.

Everybody thinks their idea is great. Even you thought your idea was great, right? You might be better off trying to growing your personal brand in addition to launching a company. If you have a name for yourself, it should be easier to get YC's and TC's attention.I'm sure if one of the famous HNers launched something, people would notice (and they have)

I am eager to find out which one.

Making yourself known to marketers is far easier than making yourself known to end users.

Sometimes success is just on the other side of the fail mountain.

My best advice to everyone is start as early as you can to buy time :)

http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383

If you want to advertise, learn to advertise. If you cannot and will not learn to advertise, hire an expert to do it for you. Don't make hurdles into an excuse to fail.

2) Do not sacrifice other promotion opportunities for Tech Crunch. It kills startups that keep it in a stealth mode.

30% is product (programming - product must not suck), 30% is marketing, 30% is sales and 10% is luck (there is always some luck).

That is how it is. Yeah that is cliché.

And don't give up.

I also have a wife and a baby. And she feels my highs and lows as much as I do.

The excitement of a new idea and the let-downs when things don't explode into a fervour of web 2.0 money madness. But we do okay - I work from home and we have enough money to get by and we're pretty happy. That's enough! That's okay! You don't need to be a billionaire to be happy and doing okay! (Disclaimer: yes, I would like to be a billionaire :)

I've got a few ideas: whatwhere.com.au is a search engine that's going nowhere at the moment, smsmyride.com let's you TXT people by number plate, smscard.com.au lets you call overseas from your mobile phone, 8centsms.com let's you send SMS from the web and decalcms.com which is my YC app, is a fantastic content management system that is proving really hard to sell!! They mostly look crap - we're working on the design etc. and it's hard.

It takes a long time to get something right when you're funding it yourself. Working Software is self funded. We're not a design company - workingsoftware.com.au is my business - we do a lot of backend work so it's hard to pay for good design (although I've recently employed a design/html guy full time and we're working on improve our "brand").

But we do consulting and pay the bills (most months :) and gradually we're moving towards productisation.

And that's how 37 signals did it - and you know what? They've been around for TEN YEARS. And although they started getting some press pretty early on it's not like they've been the masters forever, they just kept working on it.

My advice to you is: sure it's good to apply for YC, sure it's good to have ideas and build things - but don't put all your eggs in one basket. Focus on what you can achieve for very little outlay, do that, see what happens, then change it and keep on keeping on.

Also - employ someone to work with you, or find a partner. It makes a world of difference when you're not doing it all alone. I have 2 full time employees now - 1 coder and 1 HTML/design guy, and a part-time book-keeper. I work with others in partnerships as much as I can. I'm very open to collaboration and always talking to people about my business and striking up relationships.

Just because you don't get funded DOESN'T MEAN THE END OF ANYTHING. You just need to work out a business model where you can pay for 2 days of innovation with 3 days of billable time, and that's how you get somewhere.

Sure, I applied to YC, I'd love to get funded. We could build things way faster that way. But if I don't get funded, hell it's just back to business as usual.

You don't need that boom and bust mentality - good things happen to those who work and wait, just as much as those that have meteoric rises to fame.

There are plenty of examples of admirable people who have received success early and late in their careers in ALL fields. Examples of people who have lost it all after being on the highest of highs, examples of people who work hard their entire lives and never see ANY recognition!!

All you can do is love what you do enough that, if it works it works, and if it doesn't it doesn't. Make sure you save some money, make sure you enjoy the ride, make sure you're working to a realistic schedule and that you set time limits on your hours and that sort of thing.

The way I see people talking about it on YC and vids etc. is: you get funded or you go get a job. That's not necessarily the case, so don't lose heart: you can make money and be happy without Silicon Valley funding :)

I believe that many people would be willing to pay more...

You seem to be equating a CMS to a website and that is just not the case. Original and unique Wordpress themes can cost thousands of dollars because they are generally custom made, original works of great designers. Websites/Web applications/Web services can cost ten, even hundreds (and beyond!), of thousands of dollars because not only the design is custom made, the development of the application and system to management it is also made to order. Let's not even get to the part of how expensive A/B testing and user experience architecture can get.

What you are advertising right now is that you will give a free trial for a year... hosted by you guys for free... for a $999 setup fee? If that is the setup fee alone what will the cost of the CMS be? I'll be honest, I'd have no problem paying you 1k, hell I'd have no problem paying you double or triple that a year for a hosted solution, provided it really is the next big thing since sliced bread and has really great support. From what I saw in your website and video, you'll be directly competing with Squarespace, which offers a lot of the same overall functionality and costs $480 at the top tier without a yearly plan (and seems like it has more features), though I do want to point out that I like yours better from what I saw in the video since it looks a lot more polished IMO.

I've been developing websites for ages and acting as sysadmin for longer even, so I kind of don't appreciate the patronizing, specially since I'm saying I like your product. In any case my advice is this: develop a scalable and sensible pricing structure that will fit your target audience, listen to what your potential customers (read everybody here) have to say, and for gods sakes if you're going to offer a free trial make it really free (and for a month or two, a year is just overkill for a cms)... People will gladly part of hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars a year if they like your service, but paying a thousand dollars to try a CMS out just doesn't make much sense.

Edit: Also you really need to spruce up the design of your CMS's website. It really takes away merit won by the video.

Yeah I was only referring to prefab themes in that price bracket

"What you are advertising right now is that you will give a free trial for a year... hosted by you guys for free... for a $999 setup fee? If that is the setup fee alone what will the cost of the CMS be?"

Okay so this is obviously a problem with how I'm communicating the deal. I was really pitching this at people who have a website already, whether it has a CMS or not, we'll "Decalify" it for $999 and host it free for a year. After that, you pay for the hosting.

"I've been developing websites for ages and acting as sysadmin for longer even, so I kind of don't appreciate the patronizing, specially since I'm saying I like your product. In any case my advice is this: develop a scalable and sensible pricing structure that will fit your target audience, listen to what your potential customers (read everybody here) have to say, and for gods sakes if you're going to offer a free trial make it really free (and for a month or two, a year is just overkill for a cms)... People will gladly part of hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars a year if they like your service, but paying a thousand dollars to try a CMS out just doesn't make much sense. Edit: Also you really need to spruce up the design of your CMS's website. It really takes away merit won by the video"

I wasn't meaning to patronise you - I suppose I had assumed we were essentially talking about "the same thing" however I clearly didn't articulate what was involved very well. To be honest I assumed the type of viewer I was pitching that video/deal at at the time would be unable to make the distinction between "website" and "CMS" - ie. they just want to know what it costs

And yes the design sux :) That was basically something I threw up there to give this thing some presence and it worked to an extent - we got a few early adopters mostly through an extended network and having a video online was a big part of that.

The design and launch pricing structure is something we're currently working on - and it sounds like HN is going to be a great place to get some feedback so thanks!

Incidentally what is the etiquette on hijacking someone else's thread like this??

Offer the same thing for a month with no setup fee and you'll get a lot more customers (though I don't know if that's what you are looking for at this point... maybe you're waiting for more infrastructure before a big launch, I apologize if this is the deal and I'm getting ahead of myself) and can probably build some following through word of mouth alone.

In any case I like your product, looks really polished, and I hope you guys hit it big. Good luck!

you see, I just made a HN-style comment. Draw your own conclusions.