I've never tried it myself, but I've heard people have had decent success using a combination of Twitter searches + live chat.
You can monitor people on Twitter complaining about the problem you solve, @reply them to check at your site, and then chat on oLark/SnapEngage to help convert them into users (or just do customer development).
I've worked with teams at Lean Startup Machine who have done this, but you have to be careful not to get shut down by Twitter as a spammer. I like how dools did it: only targeting people with the hashtag, and writing personalized messages. Think of it from their perspective: if you received this tweet, would you flag the user as spam?
I did this when we launched our new on-boarding process for our CMS recently[1].
I put in hashtag monitors into hootsuite for #html, #css and #wysiwyg (I've found using hashtags makes people much less annoyed at receiving a reply out of the blue) and then replied to people with a personal message who were chatting about them.
Because I could do it on my phone (ie. on the train, waiting in line) it was basically "free" time.
I wrote maybe 500 messages, got about 120 people to the page and about 57 of them put their email address in, all within 3 days of launching.
Love this strategy. Something like this would make for a great startup, and there actually is one doing something similar in NYC called LocalResponse. Their approach is a little different in they're focused on marketing rather than customer development or conversion.
I think SlideShare is one of the most underutilized tools out there. It's a great way to break up a lot of information (people enjoy clicking through) and they have a vibrant community. I post things up there and routinely get tens of thousands of highly relevant views.
"Meetup.com is one of those services that will do the job of driving traffic to your meetup if you create one." This is a great point, but I think it's also important to focus on creating successful meetups. This is a huge time commitment. Creating a consistent arena for your user base requires coordinating activities that they would love, and then reaping the benefits of customer loyalty. It's an excellent idea, but you need to devote a good deal of time to it (sometimes even a person).
Every craigslist post defaults to "You are not allowed to email me about related services." It's not up to them to try and enrich my life with their new services I didn't ask to hear about.
It's blatant spam. But blatant spam and lawbreaking resulting in money hats is apparently okay around here. (It's not shady or illegal -- it's hustling and hacking the system.)
It's a very fair point, and I think it's good to always err on the side of "not being shady".
Just to play devil's advocate, many companies would never have broken through the clutter if they didn't break a few rules to be seen at first. This includes great companies many of use use every day (like AirBnB). Reddit was forced to create fake accounts and pose fake conversations to get started. Google certainly was breaking some rules when they began scraping/indexing the entire web (i realize this is an oversimplification).
The ones that are truly garbage disappear when they start breaking rules. They piss people off. The ones who do it right, and offer something valuable, rise up.
Again that is just playing devil's advocate. I don't think it's black and white, and I think it's a really interesting conversation
A brief quibble - Reddit was not "forced" to do anything. They chose to create and utilize fake accounts/conversations, but they certainly could have chosen not to do so.
The harm is you are you and you are not them. They are them and no matter how much we think we can make their lives better, they are busy and don't want to hear it.
The problem is when they are kinda dumb (most of the time?) and the targed spam or leadgen job postings actually work.
"Job in your area paying $175k/year for your exact experience!" -- but when you inquire, it never exists. Conveniently they happen to have similar jobs with compensation structures consisting of wobbly jello.
So is it just matznerd.com and natmobi.com who's domains I need to add to my blacklist?
Because those sorts of words are exactly what _every_ spammer uses to justify their behaviour. (including, hilariously, such beautiful grammar constructs as "… trying to help wanting people connect with a …")
It's spam, no question about it. If I get it from you I'll probably just ignore it, but if I'm in a bad mood or looking for timewasting activities, I'll report it to gmail/rbl/mailchimp/campaignmonitor/your isp - mostly for the lulz, but partly because I feel I owe some of my time to occasionally trying to slow the inevitable slide down the tragedy of the commons that the internet has been on since the eternal September…
Spam does not mean unsolicited marketing. Door-to-door sales, direct mail, telemarketing, billboards - even the guy who in every tourist trap in the world who begs you to come eat at his restaurant - are all unsolicited marketing, but not spam. Spam refers to bulk-generated, unsolicited marketing over electronic mediums.
The distinction is important, because in non-electronic mediums, the conversion threshold for unsolicited marketing is high enough that the market more or less self-regulates. Email, or electronic mediums broadly, became a new territory because the CPM of unsolicited messages effectively went to zero, meaning all but the lowest conversion rates would generate positive ROI.
As such, sending strangers unsolicited messages about new services over email, twitter, etc is legit, as long as you are doing so manually and are not deceiving them. I have no idea what the AirBNB folks did, but I suspect that it was manual.
For a graphical illustration of the history of the word spam, check out this google ngram search: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=spam%2Cjunk+mai.... I started it at 1930 b/c I thought it was kind of fun to see the spike around the time that Hormel introduced the other sort of Spam.
I think as long as you are providing valuable and relevant information to the user, that it is fine. In this case, AirBnB connected people who were looking for renters, to an excellent service that furthered their goal.
I like the way you put it - "Put simply, go to where your potential users are".
I would add - Think about not just users, but power users! At-least in the begining you are not looking for a regular joe, but somebody who would benefit the most by your product, and be the cheerleader moving forward.
You can monitor people on Twitter complaining about the problem you solve, @reply them to check at your site, and then chat on oLark/SnapEngage to help convert them into users (or just do customer development).