1.) Release to family members, trusted friends & people that have a stake in the project. Get their feedback.
2.) Release on news.YC. Get their feedback.
3.) Find some influential bloggers in your field. Don't release to them; instead, send them a personal e-mail asking for their feedback.
4.) Go to forums in your field, pick out some dedicated early users that are really into the space. Send them personal e-mails and get their feedback.
5.) Release to the blogs and forums you identified in 3.) and 4.) Pay close attention to feedback and iterate.
6.) Release on Reddit/Digg/the rest of your list.
I've been a part of a startup that tried the PR blitz thing and it failed miserably, because we didn't serve any useful purpose. Gotta make it basically good before people will pay attention.
There've also been several times when I've released on news.YC to a very ho-hum reception and then killed the project, or otherwise took it in very different directions. That's probably not the response you want to hear, but it's much better to kill a product without a market early than to keep improving it speculatively.
Sounds like a good plan and yes this is what we shall do. Iterating is the best approach as we get some time to fix the issues before more users know about it.
Any idea on how to find influential bloggers? (Besides Googling)
Like is there any blog searching place that shows me ranks of blogs (based on traffic) and and have those distributed in categories like (Technology, Business, E-commerce, blah...)
I'm not really one to ask, since it's not like I've had great luck finding influential bloggers, and I usually leave the marketing to others anyway. I'd check out your competitors, see who's commenting or writing about them, and then see if they have blogs or homepages though.
1.) Release to family members, trusted friends & people that have a stake in the project. Get their feedback.
2.) Release on news.YC. Get their feedback.
3.) Find some influential bloggers in your field. Don't release to them; instead, send them a personal e-mail asking for their feedback.
4.) Go to forums in your field, pick out some dedicated early users that are really into the space. Send them personal e-mails and get their feedback.
5.) Release to the blogs and forums you identified in 3.) and 4.) Pay close attention to feedback and iterate.
6.) Release on Reddit/Digg/the rest of your list.
I've been a part of a startup that tried the PR blitz thing and it failed miserably, because we didn't serve any useful purpose. Gotta make it basically good before people will pay attention.
There've also been several times when I've released on news.YC to a very ho-hum reception and then killed the project, or otherwise took it in very different directions. That's probably not the response you want to hear, but it's much better to kill a product without a market early than to keep improving it speculatively.