silvia77

Question: what if you have a launched business + the trademark to the name and someone still owns and won't sell the .com URL? We own the .co and all other extentions but the .com is preferred, would you go about thr same way groupon did it in this case?

Here is a direct link to web2.0 Expo's last html email campaign http://recp.mkt41.net/servlet/MailView?m=35580090&r=NTUy... (link is a little long)

It's not spammy but it does include graphics, colors, layouts, etc. Also I could be wrong but I think using an html email gives you a more accurate open rate.

Sure some people can misuse html email's but I don't think they are all bad.

We pulled all of these localized resources from the city specific StartupDigest's we publish. Thought it would be a good idea to put them all on page and accessible outside of the email newsletter.

Would appreciate your thoughts and if you have any city specific (national + international) blogs, news sites, or resources to add leave it as a comment below.

wow.. really?

If you are targeting restaurants (if not pick a good segment, small business is huge) then I would suggest going at off hours (very early or late), going in person, and talking to the owner face to face.

Most likely if its a small business restaurant the owner will be there. Even better is buy breakfast or dinner at the restaurant.

Then when you get a chance explain the problem you are trying to solve and a brief explanation on what you are doing, with the goal of getting feedback and their opinion. Only then if the owner is interested in hearing more should you follow up with an official pitch/presentation on what you can do.

It's a hard and slow process but no one said #startuplife is easy

Never used Groupon, but you might want to try emailing/calling some of the Retailers that have used Groupon in the smaller cities and see firsthand how effective it is.

Might be hard to find a "Retail Owner" here on HN.

Second this, have had a great experience with 99 designs in the past.

I actually tried that (I thought it was that simple too) but the formatting came out all strange.

I sent a note to Posterous support, and they said that Posterous was not meant for email newsletter archives and I should not use it for that reason.

Weird but for some reason it doesn't quite work and they seem to not be focusing on that.

actually a big opportunity is to be able to take newsletter archives and turn them into blog posts. It's actually a big problem in the email world.

If you are interested in this space email me chris at thestartupdigest.com

Open rate varies a lot city to city but we see anywhere between 20%-60% opens across all of the issues.

We still use twitter/facebook to spread our blog posts, archives, etc but email is our main channel of distribution. For us we see twitter bringing ~30% of our subscribers, facebook doesn't do so well for us.

This was a post we wrote up in follow up to this HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1488170

Gives our personal account to why email lists are so valuable and some of the metrics we collect to track this.

here is the link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489352

just wrote a follow up piece on HN about our personal story on why email newsletters are worth so much: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489352

In our experience, once you hit above 50k subscribers it starts to get the attention of advertisers. Also important is how long you have been doing it for, it takes time to build up trust.

There was just a HN story asking about non-developer success stories (sorry don't have the link, writing this using the HN iPhone app) this is a perfect story for that discussion.

A large % of companies were started by non-coders, and this is a good example of one. Not to say anyone can solve hard technical problems but just because you can't code doesn't mean you can't start something great.

There is nothing wrong with starting a business in a traditional industry, the most important thing is doing something you love and want to do.

Was hoping for more discussion around bootstrapping and being cheap as opposed to iPhone development.

Is there anything wrong with being cheap? My company is currently barely "ramen profitable" and being cheap is more of a necesity vs a choice.

Being able to lower your standard of living is a big part of being an entrepreneur, we all need to be able to do it at some point.