How do you help YC companies to create maximum buzz in minimum time and money? what practical tools would you suggest (SEO, facebook, twitter, blogs, buying email list (not spam), google ads, display/banner advertising, other social media etc.)?
Do you ever suggest them to hire a professional PR firm?
Depends on the company. We always suggest they talk to Techcrunch, since Techcrunch covers all types of startups. Beyond that it depends on what they're doing and how much money they have. PR firms are good for startups that have raised at least a million; I wouldn't use one with much less. Google ads are good if you're doing something very specific. I wouldn't recommend email as a way of getting new users. The white hat half of SEO should be done as a matter of course; and the black hat probably never.
On the whole, the best ways to get attention are the honest ones: to make something so good that people spontaneously tell their friends about you, and to impress bloggers so much they want to write about you. This is especially true for YC cos, because we like to fund people whose strength is in building things, rather than marketing them.
It took me a while to realise this. I looked at all the software on my PC that I use, and I realise, almost all were recommended by either my brother or my friend Joe. If he discovers anything new and nice, he'll call me and tell me, because we're both computer fellas.
I will then tell a few of my contacts, and in a single day, the software joe recommended could easily reach 20 people. On the second day, those 20 people will probably spread it further.
Good software needs seed marketing. You need to get the news out initially, after that people will recommend it. What one should do is add features or design around a philosophy that makes personal recommendations easy.
Marketing is not neccessary if you design with marketing in mind. If your app does not get recommended it's because you've not reached your goal yet.
You're not cool enough for Joe to call me and say - hey Max, check out what I just found...
I would only care whether the right people are interested, not any random person.
For instance, I'd rather target small businesses who are in a hurry and need to get things done rather than, say, young kids with tons of spare time and no money to spend. To target them with their online games, Blizzard Entertainmnent had to create special "gift card" type time cards that you can buy in stores with cash because much of the people they're going after don't have credit cards.
So, start by building a product meant to appeal to people with $$$ first.
1) Identify what group of people (professional group, culture, etc) would benefit most from your product.
2) Seed early to this group and use them as a sounding board. Build a relationship with them. Focus on solving problems for this user base first.
3) Figure out a way to drive and capture the enthusiasm of this group and leverage it outside when you launch. Your PR will not just point to a product, but a social group using your product in a compelling way. Your feature list is now a benefit story.
this is very generic things to do to begin with - the idea is to know what exactly pg recommends to use as a powerful tool, such as PR firms, facebook, twitter, blogs, buying email list (not spam), google ads, display/banner advertising, other social media etc. The marketing scene is changing extremely fast - what works today may not work tomorrow - so it would be interesting to know what pg suggest if any company has to start today.
Honestly, focus on the product first. If you fulfill a strong need for a defined group of people they will do a lot of the talking for you–in a much more authentic way then you ever could.
Once you get their support you can put your small budget behind the stories they are telling around your product.
Your question is very generic, too. Startups targeting consumers are different from startups targeting enterprises. What users do you address? What about the business model you have in mind? The size of your market? Has your product viral features built in? etc, etc, etc. I think it is presumptuous to believe that there is a single marketing strategy that may fit all startups in the world...
true, one size can't fit all - though i think major YC cos. are mass consumer base (than enterprise soln.) so buzz creation tool for most of them will be more or less the same (may be i'm wrong).
It's very interesting to me, given how advanced the HN community is in terms of programming and business strategy, how inefficient most of the marketing strategies suggested here are.
(with the notable exception of: "make an incredibly useful product")
Indeed, the notion of "make something awesome and it will market itself" is a useful heuristic for guiding a deeper, sustainable marketing strategy. It's a meritocracy out there, folks, especially in terms of media.
("Media" meaning the layer of communication that connects services and users)
That media you create also needs to stand alone as useful information. Traditional PR is based on leveraging connections ("beating the meritocracy") on behalf of clients to expose a product to an audience. One business strategy equivalent of this might be Facebook forcing users to return to Facebook.com to reply to an inter-profile message; it's unnecessary coercion that ultimately degrades the quality of the product.
I advise businesses to begin creating an unfair advantage that is based on the preexisting expertise of the management team. Toyota's marketing channel within Twitter Japan and Miller Brewing's BrewBlog.com are stellar examples of how you can begin to create a marketing channel that attracts attention on its own merit (and has great SEO effects...and scales like a mother).
There's a number of other issues to grok here, including viral mechanisms and transparent outreach tactics, that I unfortunately don't have time to get into at the moment.
I did get into some of this a little bit on my blog here:
yup, i know that and there are many ideas with their own pros and cons, so it would be interesting to know from pg what he thinks is the best tool in today's time and age!
This must be the most stupid reply I've read on this site. Read pgs essays? Which one? How is that related to marketing? Is pg a God where reading his essays will lead to salvation?
Someone asked a specific question about marketing. If there is an essay by pg related to this, then link to the article or STFU.
I just saw your reply, yet someone else had posted the link to the article I was referring to. Did you READ the context that the question was asked in? It was formulated as an ASK PG QUESTION YOU JACKASS . . . how stupid do you feel now? Oh, and I see that you got your buddies to upmod you . . . NIIIICEEEEE
On the whole, the best ways to get attention are the honest ones: to make something so good that people spontaneously tell their friends about you, and to impress bloggers so much they want to write about you. This is especially true for YC cos, because we like to fund people whose strength is in building things, rather than marketing them.