I know there are plenty of successful entrepreneurs who reads this site so I want to pick HN's collective brains on this. What are the steps you take to ensure a successful product launch?<p>A little background. We are days away from launching www.cardmunch.com, a dead-simple way to transcribe business cards on mobile device with unbelievable accuracy(launch pending AppStore approval). Until recently most of our efforts has gone into building the product over launch marketing. Now I find that being small and new really work against you when trying to get the attention of the big blogs.<p>Would you mind sharing some of your product launch strategies / experiences? There seem to be so much that you can do to market a new product. In your opinion, which approach is worth the time and effort and how would you prioritize it over other approaches? What are some of the time sink that I should definitely avoid? And any out-of-the-box ideas that ended up working out really well for you?<p>Would love to hear your thoughts on this.<p>P.s. If any HN readers has a pile of business cards that they would like to get the contacts right on their phone, shoot me an email at bowei@cardmunch.com. I'd be happy to give you a sneak peek of what are we doing.
What I'd suggest is to find a way to make your story into a story. In other words, come up with a hook, a narrative that helps the story write itself.<p>Put another way: what's so special about CardMunch, as opposed to the iPhone app I already use (where I take a photo of a business card, and it scans it into my Contacts)?<p>If there's not a compelling "unique value proposition" for the product, what's so special about you guys? What makes this not just another launch amongst a million?
Just looked at your site. What a cool idea. I've always had trouble figuring out how to get my business cards digitized. This is definitely a big move! How do I sign up?
For our launch, we also tried reaching out to tech / travel blogs to write about us. I found the time spent following-up and convincing them that your product is awesome wasn't worth it when you can be coding or improving the product (it was probably 10% conversion rate for us). A month later, I found a lady with good PR network to help us draft a press release and reach out to her network. Within weeks, we were on Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and other tech blogs. If you don't mind spending some money, I'd suggest you save time & frustration and hire a contractor to help with the news splash.
Write to bloggers with audiences that are your potential customers. Tell them about your product and politely ask if they would like to feature you in a post. Offer some pre-written copy (not too much) for them to use or cut/paste from to make it easier for them. Offer free downloads of your software for e.g. 5 of their readers (but don't do that for everyone you email).<p>Keep it brief, be polite, and some might bite. Michael Dorfman's advice about your USP and your story (either/both are good for bloggers) is good advice to keep in mind when thinking of what to write.
One thing that's always frustrated me about these sort of apps is that I don't actually want every business card I pick up at a conference to become a contact. I want to collect the information electronically, but I don't want to stuff my contacts with people I'm not regularly contacting.
Interesting angle on the business card problem. Looking forward to seeing this after release.<p>In terms of advice, how about buying adspace or sites like Free-App-A-Day?