ravikalaga

A few things I use -

1. Mailchimp 2. Twitter 3. Vimeo Videos 4. Facebook (but this is dicey if you have not yet launched)

None of the above cost any money. If you are a mass consumer startup, printing a few t-shirts and fliers will not hurt either. Have a few of your employees give out the fliers requesting users to review/test at popular junctions in any major US city during rush hr at commute hubs. You will be wearing the t-shirts.

Online marketing is easy and hard at the same time. I believe the most important aspect is telling a clear & a good story.

By the way, you will probably get more thoughtful and accurate comments if you describe what it that you are trying to market.

Thank you. Thanks to facebook, online bartering may just be a way to reduce how much we consume. Atleast that's the guiding philosophy.

Simple UI, like it.

So only for traders? No chance of regular investors to use the information in some way? Just curious about this only being for such a niche crowd.

Finalized service name. Finishing UI. Finishing the stories and pitch. Working on building a network in the bay area to build the team.

Not a bad month considering 8hr workdays including a full weekend release. Land at http://shelfmine.com

Pragmatic is the first place I have turned to after deciding to start building my product by myself. They are thankfully short and to the point.

My suggestion would be to start off with their books and then fork to other more in-depth resources available online.

- Things you take for granted here in the US are still dicey back there. Transportation, timings around food, general work hours, weekend relaxation etc. It's a different lifestyle so change as soon as possible.

- Employee behavior is different due to the context there. For most survival is still the key vs. US. You will find very few engaged people who have laser like focus (blame the service industry for this) because of the sheer number of distractions.

- Learn subtle gestures asap. No one ever says NO so be careful of your expectations when you get a yes.

- Everyone there has a story and unlike in the US, its not always sexy or straight forward. Don't judge or figure everything out.

- Be constantly amazed at the sense of humor!

What could be cooler for a few days work to be out in open beta? You get feedback from real users (not friends/well wishers) and if it works well or sucks, you at least get honest feedback.

Thanks Alex. I gave up after trying to find someone magical for 2 months and I now have a demo site with a fake back-end. Slogging through Ruby on Rails and I realized this is really fun and not very different from solving puzzles.

Great deck. You are being generous with the one green stick dude.

Your notes are more or less similar to mine, definitely better presented. I see a common thread in almost all the stories by the speakers, product is the king and that's relatively the easy part. Everyone has company/people issues and your really cannot figure it out so the actual "startup" part is going to be a rush anyway.

Get the product right and eventually the rest of the things will fall in place.