I think the point that launching a startup with no "followers" is difficult. I'm in the same boat. I haven't blogged in 10 years, I have 30 or so twitter followers (most of which I'm pretty sure are hookers) and nobody knows who I am. When Notch or Biz Stone says "I'm launching a startup" they immediately have traction--the author knows that the rest of us have to hustle.
I'm finding it difficult but seeing rays of light. My project (http://www.thetaboard.com) is just getting of the ground (still an MVP) and getting visitors is tough. Luckily my product is something HN readers might actually buy so I get more value than most out of HN posts. I've had a couple make the frontpage and had some (free) signups from it.
The author makes some great points and I'm defintely going to try some of their ideas for creating organic search traffic.
But Notch wasn't "Internet famous" until after Minecraft launched. Minecraft made him Internet famous. In other words, Notch is Internet famous because Minecraft was a hit, Minecraft wasn't a hit because Notch was Internet famous.
Don't worry about how un-famous you are. Put that energy into building something that makes you famous.
No, his hard work on Minecraft made him famous--I'll give you that. But when he released his MMO the other day, he probably had 1 million people who at least wanted to check it out. Now the new game will be judged on its own merits but Notch's Internet celebrity gave him instant traction.
This is exactly the kind of "echo chamber" thinking I'm arguing against.
If Notch launched a startup in a space where no-one knows or cares who Notch is, he'd have no advantage from his fame. Of course he shouldn't, that would mean giving up an advantage. But that means you or I can enter that area on a more level playing field.
The world of startups is much larger than the tiny slice of the world that cares about internet fame, and much more varied than your social circle (e.g. HN).
I think the author does make good points, but framing the whole thing as if not being internet famous is a disadvantage shows a very distorted view of startups.
I think this is a little naive. If Notch opened a burrito stand, he'd atleast get some press... 'Billionaire Game Developer Ditches Video Games for Burritos' and a bunch of people would eat a burrito just to see why.
Having no professional network, no twitter followers, no blog audience is starting from zero. The author is saying that launching a startup from this position is more difficult than it would otherwise be.
Of course it can be done or we wouldn't be here. It's just harder. The author was telling how.
This is a service that I've seen before. Not yours of course, but others like it. Why would I use yours as opposed to the others out there? All I see is that your product is "easy". It's probably a great service, but you've got to let people know why you're so great!
Author here. I tend to agree. But most people aren't "X" famous where "X" is the field they are trying to create a startup in.
In that case they need to find ways to reach out to users and early adopters without relying on their celebrity in that field.
Thus being able to generate intrest organically from people who really need what you have to offer - even if the volume of interest is initially low - is an important skill to know.
Having mediocre design skills, I struggled before to create even the simplest landing pages for my mobile apps. Like the article says, I was simply trying to create a one-page site that contains a short description of an (upcoming) app, and a way for people to enter their email addresses for future notifications.
Although this sounds really simple (I can cook up the bare html in a few minutes), I struggled to make it look half decent. Surely there must be some easy way to create such simple landing pages, but I couldn't find it. I tried wordpress themes, twitter bootstrap, and other platforms, but my designs(or lack thereof) always turn out horribly.
My question: is there an easy way to create simple, beautiful landing pages?
I don't know if this will be simple for everyone to execute as doing anything well does take time and skill but I can give a couple of pointers that helps me make simple pages that work (Convert users at rates >15% - I don't know what others get but I'm happy with 15-20%).
I used to design a lot of print advertisements. When it finally clicked for me that many of the principles are the same things started working.
Use AIDA:
- Attention - Use a super high quality and very interesting (to your target) picture. You can buy these cheaply from amateur photographers if you don't have any.
- Interest: Use a headline that says something to your target
- Desire: use a little text to make them want what you're selling. IE. tell them how it solves your biggest problem
- Action: Use all the tricks you know to make a good looking button (or read on how to do it, there are lots of sources for this) and place it in the bottom right somewhere. The bottom right is what print designers do because it's the last point your eye reaches when reading, it's the best place for a call to action
Here are two recent examples that I have created (can be improved but you get the idea). With quality traffic they convert around 20%:
That advice might not be quite what you're looking for as it's not a service that does most of it for you (someone could create that fairly simply) but it's working for me.
I'm also a terrible designer. In order to get up and running quickly, I buy themes off of http://themeforest.net - they barely cost anything, and usually have enough for you to get up and running with in the stage where you just want a landing page (some even come with PHP scripts to run newsletter signups for you).
Without looking like a template? No. There are alot of tools (like you mentioned wordpress, twitter bootstrap, even launch rock) and sites that helps you make a non ugly looking landing page, but it's hard to make a 'simple, beautiful' page using template (especially more if you want it to have your branding style and personality).
(To break it down why it can be difficult to design a page – you need to understand typography, brand/style, colors, grid/layout, ui/ux patterns and copywriting. Great designers make it look easy, just as any other experts in their respective fields.)
Learning a little about typography makes a huge difference. It's amazing how good even a simple black and white document can look with the right typography. The other stuff is good, but text is what counts. Get it right, and people will forgive a lot.
The simplicity of the site is what made me like HN originally. Simplicity in and of itself can be a draw especially in the super-engineered web 2.0 of today.
Here's my advice (which is contingent upon your actually selling a product or service):
Setup an affiliate program and promote that as assiduously as you promote your actual product or service.
Yes, doing so can take lots of work and managing it may take plenty of your time, but the trade-off can be well worth it. If you do things even 50% right you will end up with dozens, or even hundreds, of hungry internet marketers and webmasters promoting your product for you - at almost no cost to you.
Pay your affiliates only after you get paid, (and after your merchant-account-mandated CC chargeback threshold passes). Flatter your top grossing affiliates with audio, video or email interviews (which you could publish to your startup's blog and which they will definitely spam the heck out of to everybody they know).
Once you get enough traction and revenue to afford it, offload your affiliate management to a network like CJ or PepperJam.
I used to be one of them so I can tell you, internet marketers are ALWAYS looking for a great product to sell/promote. Cut revenue-sharing deals with Internet Marketing forum owners for even more exposure.
Do all that and, while I cannot guarantee that your product will succeed in the long run, I can guarantee that it won't fail as a result of nobody knowing it exists.
One CAN get initial traction and customers without having to be an internet celebrity.
A fantastic first step is to ask to the internet marketing community. I'll summarize my tips on this issue to try and help the readers as much as I can, but please reach out to SEO/SEM/Branding people in the community at each stage of your start-up journey so you can keep learning, growing and driving traffic to your site. So here's my advice to find those early customers:
- Build a fascinating product. Something that is better than every competitive proposal in one or more dimensions (design, speed, simplicity, robustness, etc). You know you have this when you feel passionate about your product. At this point, it doesn't matter to have erred in some minor market assumptions. Just do a solid MVP given your current understanding of the market needs.
- Go to search.twitter.com and find 50 people that are looking for the solution you provide (i.e. search for "i want a widget that does x")
- Network with this group of 50, give them premium accounts and give them early access to your product. Congrats, you've got a nice beta testing team with a desire for your product.
- Reverse engineer the "mind-set" of this group of people: do they want speed, low price or robust functionalities? Then, according to this create "personas", ergo user profiles.
- Now comes the fun part: you're going to market to each independent user profile with a separate marketing effort. Before doing this, install Mixpanel and make sure you're tracking EACH distinct user profile. Then place one Google Adwords campaign for each profile. You want to discover which user profile prefers your product, which type of user converts best, etc. To get ideas for keywords I recommend Wordtracker.com (some people like the Google keyword tool, but that's ok as well).
- Since now you know the type of user you want to target raise your bets: create multiple landing pages for this user type (the article gives you a good idea of how to do just that).
- Tweak the conversion rate (ratio of sign-ups per visits) that each page gives you. Ideas to do this include: creating professional introductory videos, adding testimonials, doing basic A/B testing, refining your copy, etc.
- Keep refining you product. And. keep. marketing. There's so so much you can do on a budget: pay for press releases to boost your page rank and get initial awareness (under 400 dollars on prweb.com), join several interest groups and promote to their mailing list, etc.
- Internet famous celebrities don't have THAT high of an advantage over you (when it comes to marketing). They DO have great advantages when it comes to raising money but, for the purpose of building a compelling MVP... how many people do you need? Not many. You're better off with a mix of the right people and a tight knit community.
Being "internet famous" just gives you a head start on getting traction. I am working off the conviction that if I build something which solves a significant problem for people, I can build a solid user base. If I do this well enough, people with a large following will benefit from my work and share it. That's when rapid growth should occur.
