I am curious: what are your biggest PR/Marketing problems as a startup? Is it getting noticed? Getting coverage? Differentiation? What problems are startups having when it comes to marketing?
Good question. I sent emails on <a href="http://uploadthingy.com" rel="nofollow">http://uploadthingy.com</a> to about 20 blogs that I thought would be interested a while back - what happened? Nothing. Nada. The service is now profitable and growing every day. Going to try again this week. Not expecting too much. Adwords rules - at least for now.
At NewsCred, we got covered on ALL the big technology blogs (Techrunch etc) as well as a lot of mainstream press (NYT, Boston Globe, Reuters, BW etc). That was not the difficult part, although I still owe this community a blog post about how we did it (soon, I promise!).<p>The hardest part is getting your community engaged, and loving the site so much they will tell their friends. Its getting AdWords users converting into real, long-term members. It's about getting your users to love your site so much that they couldn't live without it.<p>My takeaway: the media coverage/PR feels great and seems important, but it has nothing to do with the long term success or sustainability of your site. Build something people want and love - that's more important. Get a small, but rabid user base. Get them to spread the love.
Getting web page visitors past the 1st page, and to return - conversions.<p>Until you solve this, there is little point in trying to get featured on high profile media.<p>The key might lie in providing social proof (that people actually use your services).
If there is none, visitors following links from features won't be very useful. They might be interested enough to check out your landing page (content skimming), but getting the user to slow down and really get familiar with you requires more.
It's like channel hopping with tv. You skim through a number of options and see if anything interesting comes up. But the scale of options is different. You might be able to skim through hundreds of websites in one sitting with tabbed browsing. That's not a lot of time per site.
I just wrote a blog post about attacking the chicken and egg problem: when users won't sign up because no one is there. Hopefully there will be some usable advice:<p><a href="http://marketingstartups.com/2008/12/15/10-tips-on-attacking-the-chicken-and-egg-problem-new-users-wont-sign-up-because-no-one-is-there/" rel="nofollow">http://marketingstartups.com/2008/12/15/10-tips-on-attacking...</a><p>If you find it useful, pls let me know and I'll submit it to HN. I don't want to be the guy that submits everything he writes.
time. Resources. Lack of artistic/design skill<p>(actually, I'm selling about as fast as I can get servers up, so marketing is not high on the priority list right now)<p>check out <a href="http://prgmr.com/xen/" rel="nofollow">http://prgmr.com/xen/</a><p>Horrible, no?<p>I'm moving to a design based on <a href="http://prgmr.com/~lsc/css/" rel="nofollow">http://prgmr.com/~lsc/css/</a> - very minimalist (when I'm done, most words on that page will be links to more information)<p>The idea is that I have no taste. I can come up with something that conveys the idea, but I'm pretty much operating on blind trust when choosing a designer.<p>I can give you a long list of links to designs that I've got from people which were either clearly bad, or that other people told me were horrible.<p>In my business, credibility is very important. Well, that, and price, but I'm the cheapest of my competitors by quite a lot, so it's really only credibility I need to worry about. A web presence is part of that.<p>I was also approached about writing a book on the subject, so I imagine that will help: <a href="http://nostarch.com/xen.htm" rel="nofollow">http://nostarch.com/xen.htm</a> though I clearly have missed the hype sweet-spot.
I think that largely depends on what product is being sold and what market you're in.<p>Cloud9 sells software to tour operators and other travel suppliers and, unfortunately, our potential customers are not very internet savvy, making it rather difficult for us to reach potential customers.
I think Squeezed Books is a cool idea. I'm less certain that it will ever be a business that generates a lot of money, but I still put some effort into it, and would like to see it grow. Getting critical mass, though, is a bitch!
With my current project I've been having trouble being noticed. I've been featured on Mashable but that's about it.<p>Differentiation is pretty tough too (but integration has been easy!).