Comments on: Why A Link from TechCrunch Will Not Make You Rich

By: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding | Software by Rob

Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding | Software by Rob — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 07:21:20 +0000

[...] This article is #7 in a series about startup marketing. The first 6 (not required before you read this one) are available here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6. [...]

By: Startup Marketing: The Nine Levels of Traffic Quality | Software by Rob

Startup Marketing: The Nine Levels of Traffic Quality | Software by Rob — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:56:25 +0000

[...] the way, this is why TechCrunch traffic is not profitable for startups. It’s completely un-targeted (unless your niche market is other startups) and you have no [...]

By: Adam Wride

Adam Wride — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:13:14 +0000

I would bet the “real market” is only partially to blame for the low conversion rate. Most folks get put up on TC or other prime time blogs before they have their product/market fit. You shouldn’t be marketing until you have that fit. Balsamiq has never been covered by Techcrunch (they purposefully avoided it). They are now doing $1.5M a year in revenue. I’d bet that if they got a full on post on Techcrunch that they would convert a very high % of those visitors – because they are ready.

By: Daniel Barnett

Daniel Barnett — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:07:10 +0000

Agree 100%. When we launched the first version of our product a few years back, we got great write ups on a number of top tier tech news sites.

And we got crazy, mad traffic. But sign ups were less than 0.01%.

We were becoming nervous that our product, our site was all wrong until the realization hit home.

Techies are not our customers. Small business owners are. Small business owners rarely read tech news…

By: Ricardo Soares de Lima

Ricardo Soares de Lima — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:54:24 +0000

What you said makes sense. The popular 15 minutes of fame became 5 seconds of fame in the era of internet.
It was great to find your site, I’m leaving my job to work creating my own products and try to make a living from it.

By: Vitaly

Vitaly — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:45:41 +0000

You have completely turn my way of marketing around, I have always tried to get on the big sites but when I do I don’t get much benefit from them.

Working on getting the word out about howsthe.com has been tough but I will give your suggestion a try.

Thanks, for the advice.