Monday, 26 March 2007

How To Market Your Web App

Emre Sokullu over at Read/WriteWeb has written a really thoughtful, and frankly helpful guide: How To Market Your Web App . I couldn't quite get my head around the three categories Emre proposes; if a site is ready to be promoted it can get such a wide audience so rapidly surely there's never any reason to "Walk"? I'd therefore suggest there's really two categories:

CategoryCharacter
WalkMass of users does not yet make the site compelling on first visit DON'T promote yet
RunMass of users already enough to make the site useful: ready to scale already
The key for me with all these kind of businesses is that they need to expect to launch in a small way several times; finding reasons to relaunch each time. This has the advantage that if the service is not quite attractive enough on the 1st, 2nd or 3rd launch, it builds experience of exactly what will start to make the service spread rapidly. Then once the company is really confident that the service is right it can open up with the major web2.0 launch platforms such as techrunch,GigaOm etc. Perhaps this is what he means by "walking"?