EPISODE 1... What This Blog is About

21 JUL

1. What is Startupmarketing.tv?

"Startupmarketing.tv is a video blog dedicated to learning about startup growth. So we will cover topics like user-acquisiton, startup marketing, user-traction, customer acquisition etc. We will have some videos where I talk about how we are growing GetComparisons, but it'll mostly have interviews with other startup founders. I will dive into details on what they did to grow their startup from day 1."   

2. Why did you start this blog?

"I blog over at How To Launch a Startup where I talk in detail about what we're doing to grow GetComparisons. And honestly I just got tired of writing since I deal with so much text all the time. But I love blogging, so I thought it'd be fun to do a video blog instead. 

Also I run into a lot of other founders, so I thought it'd be interesting to learn what theyre doing to grow their businesses, as opposed to just talking about my limited experiences. I'll be interviewing founders whose startups are successful but still young. i.e. maybe within 2 years of launch. I'll be seeking out answers to learn how they got their first few users/customers/downloads etc."

3. What is GetComparisons.com?

"GetComparisons is platform where you can find user written product comparisons. The problem is people do product comparisons all the time. They'll go into Google, type in A vs B, and do a search - they don't usually find what they're looking for. Even if it they find something, it's usually not enough and you have to cull the information for yourself.

So what we've done is built a platform where you find comparisons written by people who have used those products or have expertise on those products. These are presented side-by-side in an apples to apples format. And they're quantified so you can immediately tell the difference between the products and you can see what product is better based on users opinions. 

The reason we're doing it this way is beacuse most of the time we search for comparisons we want to know the opinion of people who have used those products. We don't want to just get data or description. We want to know why that product is better in a certain context or why its better in certain situations. 

Right now most of our comparisons are in the web services/ web applications space but we'll be branching out into different verticals. Our goal is to build this into a comprehensive product discovery and product research engine."

4. What have you done to grow GetComparisons so far?

"We started allowing users into the platform since late April so we've been getting users and content on since then. So far we have a little under 400 users and ~20% have contributed content. We started from 0. We didn't get any inital users from friends & family... we had to really fight for every user. 

Some of our users & content came from the usual suspects:

  • A landing page with signup form
  • Put a link to the landing page in email signature
  • Started publicizing the app on Facebook & Twitter
  • Commented on whatever blogs made sense for us :-)
  • Submitted our site to beta reviews and early adopter sites. Got featured on appstorm.net & betali.st.
  • Press: we got covered by The Next Web 

90% of our users & content though came from actively reaching out to people -

We actively reached out to people in our target market. In our case our users are divided into "readers" (who we expect will be 99% of the users), and "contributors". We concentrated on the contributors first so we would have content for the readers. We reached out to bloggers, product reviewers etc who had already written reviews & comparisons. We sent them personal emails asking them to check out our site and to use it. As far as the readers, most of our distribution has come through SEO and the press that we've received."

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