Re:Ask YC: $1000 to advertise my startup
by mattmaroon on Monday January 05, 2009 @07:03AM
(#420302)
Yeah that's true. If you do a blog entry about your startup, it improves to 998.
No, what I meant is that you build a reasonably successful blog and weave your start-up into the posts. You can't do that on every post, but it shouldn't be too hard to promote your own start-up on your own successful blog, right? :-)
Re:Ask YC: $1000 to advertise my startup
by mattmaroon on Monday January 05, 2009 @08:39AM
(#420396)
Ah, the 37 Signals model. Not many people can build a successful blog. Writing is hard for a lot of people, and takes a lot of work to get good at. Most people would be better off spending that time working at Wal-Mart and plowing their salary from that into AdWords.
Writing is hard for a lot of people
If your product is something that needs to be marketed to the blog-reading masses, I'd say that having a decent writer on board is roughly as important as having a decent salesperson would be for an enterprise-facing start-up.
If you can't write, better get started. Practice makes perfect. You don't need to be an amazing writer to write a successful blog, imho. You just need to be somewhat articulate and have interesting things to say (which, as an entrepreneur, shouldn't be too hard?).
Re:Ask YC: $1000 to advertise my startup
by mattmaroon on Monday January 05, 2009 @11:56PM
(#421608)
Well, that route worked for me in spades with my previous businesses, but I wouldn't recommend it to others. I started the blog for fun, and only after a couple years had become good at it and built up enough readership to turn it into a successful advertising vehicle. Had I set out on that path from the beginning I surely would have given up.
999 out of 1,000 startups get 3 click throughs total that way
I think that comes from submitting your start-up as opposed to submitting a blog post about your start-up. Each submission has a small chance of success (especially early submissions), but if you write and submit often, your chances increase, as does your skill in how to submit successfully.
If you only have one shot at it, though, then yes, it's a waste of time.