After 4 years of self-funded coding marathons I feel "finished", care to talk?

[exhaustedhacker]

I created a throwaway account to vent a little and, to be honest, to seek support of sorts from fellow entrepreneurial hackers who lurk here. I'm facing the lowest low of my journey at this point and there is no better venue to express my frustration.

I'll spellcheck this, but it won't be smooth - English isn't my native tongue.

Here's my story:

4 years ago I quit my good paying programming job, teamed up with a friend and started working on our new venture. New languages, lots of fun, a few excited beta customers - nothing could be better. The idea was big, it definitely needed funding to succeed, so after about a year of coding we still managed to pull off a nice and usable MVP which we "launched", i.e. just stopped tweaking the server. We applied to YC (rejected by email), studied "how to pitch to TC" and spent a week crafting our email to them (no response), submitted our product to HN and got rave reviews - it sat at #1 for almost the entire day in 08 and then... Silence. We never, ever got any press. We spent a couple of months trying to get some coverage but never received a single reply. We studied the blogsphere, followed people's advice, but nobody cared, so customers didn't know about us. The only way to get customers was Adwords which was prohibitively expensive, so after wasting a year and $20K of my savings I moved on. Meanwhile a mediocre competitor launched in LA, raised $12M, got their mandatory TC announcement, and another one, and another... basically a TC article for every little feature they would add. That was absolutely devastating...

For about a year I was consulting. Moved to another city to make it easier to cope with failure, gradually increased my consulting earnings to maybe 80% of my "pre-startup" levels and learned how to spend weekends with my family again.

It didn't last though - on January 2010 I got an idea which wasn't quite as huge and expensive to implement, hence I wouldn't need to send cold emails to various angle groups and VCs, so I was quite excited to trying again. I also took a sizable chunk of my savings ($60K) and hired a developer to work with me on this venture. We've been coding like mad.. I've never been so productive. 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.

...And now the same thing is happening: no response from our carefully crafted TC email (yeah, yeah, with "story" and something for TC readers, I've been reading PR-related blog posts religiously) and this time I can't even get on CrunchBase! Our company profile got stuck in "pending" mode while I'm seeing tens of new companies show up every day. Did YC again. My application is out there but I don't even entertain myself with the thought of being accepted: I'm a solo founder, didn't go to Stanford, in my mid 30s, etc. Haven't seen much of those in TC announcements. I can't even announce my product on HN and Reddit (my two only chances of any PR) because that would mean that TC loses exclusivity and won't cover me tomorrow or on Monday. What a great feeling!

So here is what I want to say to anyone who's considering jumping into the cold waters of launching your own company:

Have a fucking great idea

We all know what they say about execution. That's true. But that doesn't apply to you. You can't afford to be "average idea, but great execution" company, because you're alone. Or just too small. Average-idea-great-execution companies know people, have capital and the luxury of having every feature of their average idea covered on TechCrunch and other blogs. They can sponsor conferences, print t-shirts, host parties and announce contests - all those things ARE execution. That's the value a program like YCombinator provides, you just won't be able to do it - you're not in the Valley, you don't have 20 hours of week to network, blog, tweet, drink, etc. And coding won't get you there, therefore...

Have a fucking great idea

You'll also hear how cheap PR is these days, just start a blog. Nope, that's also not for you. Because blogging is a nearly full-time occupation, so don't expect to gain readership with that little precious time you have left from coding your product and working your day job. Successful blogs are written by well-funded competitors who don't have to code 18 hours a day and have capital to keep staff on payroll to blog/tweet/whatever and make as much attention-grabbing noise as possible. Writing pieces like "Why Scala?" twice a month won't do it for you, I've tried. So...

Have a fucking great idea

Your only chance, really, is to build something which can spread like a virus after being announced on a col-de-sac party. Something utterly addictive, unusual and truly amazing. A great self-selling, self-propagating viral-on-steroids idea (assuming you can code) is your only chance to succeed.

Ughh, I already feel a little better. My wife's expecting me home in half an hour, so I need to come up with a cheerful answer to her inevitable "how was your Big Launch Day?", that answer needs to be awesome and funny, to help take my mind off my empty inbox and server logs.

Oh, about scalas, clojures and rubies - they really, really don't matter.

[tptacek]

Why are you paying so much attention to your "launch day"? It's an entrepreneurial myth that there is a mighty "launch" that sets the tone of your business. When was Twitter "launched"? When was Carbonmade "launched"? When was Balsamiq "launched"? Or SquareSpace, MailChimp, or Fog Creek? Sure, they "launched", but who cared?

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.

[patio11]

This, this, a thousand times this. After launch, Peldi was pounding the pavement talking to itty-bitty software bloggers (like me) and giving away hundreds of licenses (60+ a day early on, I've heard) to get the word out about how much time/effort you'd save doing mockups his way. His talk about it at the Business of Software was extraordinarily inspiring: his meteoric success in the last three years is the culmination of hard charging for the last 22.

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.

[hboon]

You could argue Twitter (and FourSquare) were both launched at SXSW.

Totally agree with you point though.

[wensing]

Yes. Launch, smaunch. You'll be launched when people start telling their friends about it.

[rwhitman]

I totally hear your frustration. I've become incredibly burned out on launching startups / small products that flop.

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

[jeromec]

Honestly, there are 2 types of folks who make it: the lucky ones, and the persistent ones.

Best entrepreneurial quote ever IMO.

[auxbuss]

You reminded me of a quote by Ray Kroc, the guy responsible for McDonald's growth:

"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."

[petervandijck]

I had mefeedia on Techcrunch, and mentioned in the NYT, WSJ, Rolling Stone back in the day. The press didn't drive that much usage/traffic, really. It was mostly about being in a hot space though, I don't have any tricks to get press to share.

[smarterchild]

Agreed. I don't understand why so many people want TC coverage.

If you sell pianos, find musicians.

If you sell coupons, find local restaurants.

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

[robryan]

Especially if you aren't doing something in a hot space or aren't creating a consumer facing app. I don't blame them though, if your product is say focused at niche businesses and has little general appear it's not going to resonate well with readers.

[jdietrich]

You seem to have been terribly misled. Only very rarely do products sell themselves. 99% of the time, the product is largely incidental to the sales process. Your idea doesn't matter one jot, what matters is how well you can connect to customers and really sell to them.

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.

[fookyong]

I don't want to get all wishy-washy philosophical on you here but in Joe's case I would argue that he IS the 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.

[dstorrs]

Up until recently, I lived a few blocks from Union Square (I've since moved to San Francisco). I used to see Joe out there all the time, especially when the farmer's market was there. He was always bright, chipper, theatrical...he had a sales pitch that was half song, half story, and made you want to step up even if you had not the slightest need for a potato peeler. No matter what, he always made you smile. His daughter has taken over the business now that's he's gone.

Thank you so much for reminding me of him.

[Vivtek]

Good Lord - I want one of those potato peelers.

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

[david927]

Your idea doesn't matter one jot. What matters is how well you can connect to customers and really sell to them.

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.

[jiveassturkey]

This is good advice, but Joe didn't get his three-bedroom apartment from selling potato peelers. He got it from his fourth wife (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/nyregion/03ades.html).

Hard work is important, knowing the right people helps.

[nowarninglabel]

Wow, thank you, it was worth every second of watching Joe in action.

[ezrider4428]

AMEN! Why do you think infomercials continue to run...THEY SELL A SHITLOAD OF PRODUCT! Think about the Magic Bullet...biggest peice of shit ever....EVER...a 4-year old with a spoon can do a better job BUT they connect with you on a very specific level. they make a connection, they show YOU how YOU can do exactly what YOU always wanted to do with their product. Did you see how many different things Joe showed you how to do with just a peeler? Even if 10 of the 11 things he showed you dont apply to you, you are willing to pay $5 for a $0.10 peeler to save you a minute of your time once every 4 weeks.

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.

[richcollins]

This is terrible advice. Spending your life learning how to sell people crap that they don't need is wasting your life.

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.

[ramanujan]

> 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.

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.

[xelipe]

Thanks for sharing the clip of Joe Ades. I've seen a lot of street performers and people selling odds and ends here and there but few people have made me stop on my tracks, in the middle of the day, and made me an instant customer by buying a product that I didn't even have in mind when I set out. That is powerful.

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!

[motters]

That's a great video, and I've seen similar performances by other street vendors. I suppose it's a case of "don't sell the bacon, sell the sizzle". He's delivering an enticing spectacle, of which the actual sale is just a small component and even the product itself is relatively incidental.

[apsurd]

Read up on how TC traffic is not all it's cracked up to be. Stop caring about TechCrunch.

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.

[webwright]

I think the big thing that you're missing is that "great execution" doesn't end at building a great product. And PR is not a marketing strategy.

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.

[ajscherer]

Three of your four points are ways that his idea wasn't good enough, yet you conclude that it's not about a great idea.

[revelate]

Having just seen this it at work for a startup we helped launch, I strongly recommend (without giving too much away):

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.

[petervandijck]

I thought PR was in fact a marketing strategy. eBay did great with their (very smart) PR program.

[froo]

I'm no marketing expert, but you don't need to get on TC for your company to get traction.

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.

[dasil003]

Let me echo the sentiments that TC isn't worth jack shit. I am at a startup now that has been slogging it out for 3 years, slowly meeting people in the industry, doing deals, and building traction with the product one day at a time. We've received a lot of press in various forms, the only ones that generated any lasting traffic were partnerships with big names. The general news coverage (blog and print) was pretty worthless, with TC ranking near the bottom. That might not be true for tech-centric products like Twitter where the service itself is disproportionately useful to tech bloggers like Arrington and Scoble, and thus they gush all over the product for months on end with utter disregard for the uselessness of the product outside their own niche, but it's true for most products. The bottom line is there are lots of ways to get the word out about your product, and media coverage is not anywhere near the best one.

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.

[mrkurt]

From the "completely random advice" category: you should share how you're feeling with your wife. Optimism is good and healthy, but that's one of those partnerships that can be really helpful... if you let it.

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".

[jamesjyu]

"so after about a year of coding we still managed to pull off a nice and usable MVP"

"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.

[michael_dorfman]

You need to launch an MVP ASAP. And a lot of times, that MVP is only just a landing page (with no other functionality)!

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

[michaelchisari]

This may not work for you, but it may work for others: There's a joker in the pack that exists for those of us who don't have the capital (social or economic) to build a company simply off of an idea.

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.

[samt]

I don't know that they had connections so much as they had a hook. The hook was about a couple of students taking on the massive, evil facebook with open source software.

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

[chegra]

Nice, can you share a link to an instance of appleseed?

[olalonde]

<rant>

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...

[trevelyan]

Hmmm.... my business has always been in the same boat in terms of press, although we are a niche product and so grow essentially through word of mouth. That said... improving the product usually trumps getting an article written in the long run. And never spend more than 40 minutes writing an email.

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!

[d_r]

This is off-topic, but here is a shout out from one of your customers! PopupChinese is great. I found out about it because AdsoTrans was the most handy pinyin conversion site that I've used for years. And I don't remember how I found about that one.

[dools]

This is gread AdWords advice. I've only just started playing around with SEM (as opposed to SEO which I already have a pretty good handle on) and Google AdWords can be wayyyy to expensive for very few conversions if ur doin it rong.

Thanks for the tip!

[petercooper]

[..] just start a blog. Nope, that's also not for you. Because blogging is a nearly full-time occupation, so don't expect to gain readership with that little precious time you have left from coding your product and working your day job. Successful blogs are written by well-funded competitors who don't have to code 18 hours a day and have capital to keep staff on payroll to blog/tweet/whatever and make as much attention-grabbing noise as possible.

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.

[brc]

It's a myth that you need to post all the time to a blog in order for the blog to be useful. I post to mine maybe once a month, maybe twice. I have virtually no subscribers, but I get a lot of visitors, to the site from it.

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.

[imasr]

I don't have any advice for you, but don't forget you did manage to launch a product, twice! To me that's amazing.

[zatara]

Sometimes I think that HN is too self-centered. The fact is that HN, Reddit, TC, et al. are places where geeks/nerds/hackers go to. I personally enjoy all of them, but unless my product focus on this market, I would never waste my time worrying about being covered in them. If you make bingo stuff (à la patio11), you should be trying to reach out to those customers and just forget about TC. Part of the "make-something-people-want" involves putting aside your own personal filters and prejudices.

[greendestiny]

Launch day smaunch day, its not a launch until you get the publicity you want. When TC ignores you, have another launch day. Unless your startup is aimed at startups the TC crowd is mostly people who want to spectate your success, not use your product. There will be a bunch of sites that do cater to people who would be interested in what you do (ie lifehacker for productivity etc) focus on those. Have another launch day with those sites, with HN and reddit.

If that doesn't work iterate and launch again.

[gallerytungsten]

The first thing that comes to mind is, did you do any customer development? http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/11/what-is-custome...

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.

[ed]

Hey man, that sucks. But you picked a great place to rant -- most of us have been in this boat before :-)

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.

[joeag]

I think all you really need to do is solve an identified problem that the customer will pay for. The rest is just a matter of how big your business will get and how fast and that depends on market size, competition and execution.

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?)

[Sukotto]

I think you covered all my personal fears about starting my own app.

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

[apl]

As someone who does live in a place with what you call socialized health care, I find it utterly bewildering that anyone would ever found a start-up starting from zero.

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.

[dools]

You mean without socialized health care? (although this really isn't a discussion worth having here :)